It’s been a rainy week of catch-up for me on shows about to leave Manhattan, so I jumped a cab over to the Frick yesterday to take a good long look at their one-painting loan show built around Antea. That’s a portrait from the 1530s by …
The big Courbet show now in its last days at New York’s Metropolitan Museum is a reminder that Cindy Sherman wasn’t the first artist to get hooked on role playing. In a grand display of curatorial borrowing power, the Met show opens with a gallery containing about …
Ronni Baer co-curated “El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III”, the new show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A few weeks ago we sat down to talk about what she wanted that show to accomplish.
LACAYO: Art historians usually treat the reign of Philip III as a kind of so-so interregnum between his father Philip II, …
They have finally tied up the last of the loose ends in the succession of deaccessions required to keep Thomas Eakins’ mighty canvas The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia. This is a sale that’s been wrapped into the larger uproar over schools like Fisk University and …
I paid a revisit Thursday to the Courbet retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan. I’ll have more to say later, but for now I just want to offer this to Hollywood. If you ever make a Courbet bio-pic….
The late works of Titian were the subject of the big temporary show that just closed at the Accademia in Venice, where I caught up with it last week in its final days. Actually, it wasn’t that big, 28 canvases from the last decades of Titian’s long life, when his …
I suppose it was bound to come to this. The German artist Gregor Schneider is looking for someone terminally ill who would be willing to die in public, in something like a gallery setting. The next sound you hear will be critics and columnists, including me, chewing over the ethical implications, reminding you of art’s long …
An added attraction of the new Boston MFA show about Spanish art during the reign of Philip III is that you can slide from there to an almost literally mesmerizing little exhibition a few galleries away. This one is devoted to the contemporary Spanish realist Antonio …
Okay, I’m back from Venice. Having spent a week there last summer for the Biennale, I decided recently to do another week without the hassles of non-stop exhibition-going and blogging two or three times a day. I was still looking at art all day — it’s a hard life — but it was nice not to have to do a thing with it other than take it …
Off again to this place. I’ll blog a few times from there. Back next Monday to this place.
They’re doing it again. Every time you turn around the grand vision for Ground Zero is ground down another notch. This time it’s a two-fer — why not screw up two of the still unbuilt portions of the project at one time? One of those would be the …
Back Friday.
Or whatever you would call it when the urge to put up very tall buildings won’t go down. Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal is proposing to build a mile high tower near Jeddah. Actually, word of this project has been kicking around for a while. The engineering …
