Of all the marvelous Chinese Paintings from Japanese Collections currently visiting LACMA, courtesy of curator Stephen Little, three ink works from perhaps the 13th century not only caught my attention, they rewarded revisits and made me think I could look at them for days on end. That, I suppose, is one goal of a Zen […]
On successive days I saw similarly provocative shows, at the Guggenheim and the Museum of the City of New York. Neither contained great art; both raised questions about the role of art in society. Futurism was the kind of exhaustive, indeed definitive, survey in which the Guggenheim excels. Full of loans from Italy, it showed […]
An appearance by the estimable Sharon Waxman at an SBMA Director’s Dialogue prompted a return to my thoughts on the issue of repatriation of stolen art. It also prompted me to read her 2012 book, Loot . There was nothing in the book that added to my previous understanding of the subject, formed by reading, […]
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has a lot in common with the Barnes, now in Philadelphia. Both are private, idiosyncratic collections amassed early in the 20th century by a single individual, and both are, or have been, severely constricted by the founder’s deed of gift. The collections, of course, differ: Barnes was into […]
Once again I was so annoyed by the wall labels of a Met show that I had trouble appreciating the art. This time the show, apparently conceived and titled for marketing purposes, was called “Balthus Cats and Girls” – thus, appealing to the Met’s two main audiences: men and women. The first shortcoming of the […]
Met Director Thomas Campbell touts The Civil War and American Art as a “once-in-a-lifetime exhibition [that] proposes significant new readings of some of this country’s most iconic paintings.” It is, however, a reading I’ve seen before – among other places in the MIA’s American Sublime show. Then I wasn’t convinced; this time I was simply […]
A Museum-Goer’s Wish List (in no particular order) [work in process] Nearly every sizeable museum now has a Collections Handbook, a softcover, 2/3-size for $20-something book that illustrates and explicates a selection of highlights, usually one to a page. My wish is that this handbook feature primarily, if not exclusively, works on permanent display. What […]
Thirty years after our last visit to the City of Brotherly Love, we returned for an art visit to the new Barnes Foundation building and the much older Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsvylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). As much as we enjoyed those jewels, we also loved the setting: Philadelphia seemed clean, […]
The Louvre A more-or-less forced march of four hours let me survey most, but not all, of the Louvre’s paintings on display and made me wonder how I had seen so much more on previous visits. I don’t know a better strategy, but there must be one. I started with the Flemish and Dutch schools […]
The Musee du Quai Branly – what a hodgepodge! In a stab at the ‘new museum,’ galleries have been eliminated, and the visitor is expected to flow through continents, like some Nile-Amazon combination. Then, what impresses is not quality, but quantity. Instead of one great Kota reliquary figure, we find eleven lined up in a […]
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