Looking Around

Britain’s Prince Charles, the sworn enemy of modern architecture, has gone on the offensive again. Earlier this week he attacked a plan for a large but mostly low-rise apartment development project. Designed by Richard Rogers’ firm, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, it would be built on a site in west London across from Christopher …

Let’s finish up that conversation with Frederick Ilchman, who co-curated the smart and hilariously lustrous new show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, “Rivals in Renaissance Venice: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese.”

LACAYO: In the fall of 2006 your museum reached an agreement with the Italian culture ministry to give back to Italy 13 …

I was up in Boston last Thursday and Friday, mainly to look in on “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice”. That would be the very pleasurable new loan show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts about the ways that the Big Three of 16th-century Venetian painting pushed each other’s buttons for decades. It remains …

Again. Back Monday.

There’s some good news out of Philadelphia this morning. The recession hasn’t kept people away from the great “Cézanne and Beyond” show that’s five weeks into its run at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With ticket sales at 134,000 so far, the museum just announced that it’s pushing back the close date from May 17 to May 31. That …

Some famous names — Josh Groban, Linda Ronstandt, Wynton Marsalis — are trooping up to Capitol Hill this morning to testify before a House appropriations subcommittee on the usefulness of the arts and arts education. Lest anyone miss the utilitarian point, the hearing is being headlined as “The Arts = Jobs”.

All of this is part

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Helen Levitt was one of the pivotal figures of American street photography. Though she often photographed kids at play, it was without sentimentality. If anything she had a way of making you feel like they were signposts of the secret life of the city, doing their mysterious thing while the adult world bustled by unawares. Likewise …

Here’s an update on the ongoing crisis of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. As you probably know, two months ago Brandeis administrators started talking about closing the museum and selling off some of its collection to help close the university’s budget gap. When that decision was met by an uproar on campus and off, …

This is a bit off topic, but at Time I write about the occasional book unrelated to art or architecture and this is one I raised my hand to do. I’m a major lifelong fan of Cheever’s, so I wanted to do whatever I could to get his name back into the conversation.

At the time of his death in 1982 Cheever was so famous that it seemed …

We learn today that Yale University has brought suit to assert its right of ownership over what might be the most famous single work in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, Van Gogh’s The Night Café. The university brought suit in a federal court in Connecticut this week to have its rights recognized and to block an …

To mark the anniversary last week of the spectacular 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — among other things the thieves made off with Vermeer’s The Concert, seen above, three Rembrandts and a Manet — I made my way through The Gardner Heist, a new book by Ulrich Boser, a journalist who was drawn into the …

I took a look recently at Guest of Cindy Sherman, a documentary co-produced and directed by an ex-boyfriend of the artist Cindy Sherman, the ultimate New York postmodernist. It’s about the pleasures and humiliations, mostly the humiliations, of being the not-quite-significant other of a much more famous person. It’s been making the …

If you’ve spent any time in Chicago then you know that whole stretches of that city can seem like a beautifully curated architectural collection. Which is why I was dismayed (and a little puzzled) last month when an Illinois appellate court handed down a peculiar ruling that the state’s landmarks preservation law was unconstitutionally …