Looking Around

One last thing from that lunch two days ago with Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre. He mentioned that his museum has recently purchased a canvas by Benjamin West, Phaeton asking Apollo permission to drive the Chariot of the Sun, from about 1804. This will bring to a grand total of four the number of American pictures in the …

I made it over to a press luncheon yesterday for Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre, who was in New York to talk about his museum’s expansion projects in France and the U.S. (Abu Dhabi he wasn’t talking about much.) Those projects include the ongoing arrangement with the Atlanta High Museum. What the High is getting …

Developments on two fronts in recent days.

First off, just a week after announcing that it had spent $10 million to purchase The Milliners, a circa 1898 oil painting by Degas, the St. Louis Art Museum has dropped the other shoe — it’s putting up for auction at Christie’s ten works from its collection. Blogger Tyler Green had the …

Aristotle With a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt, 1653 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/span

The Age of Rembrandt, the big fall show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is a bit of a strange fish. It’s not just that it’s drawn entirely from the Met’s sumptuous collection of 17th century Dutch paintings. It’s chiefly about the …

Pintura 9 [Painting 9], Helio Oiticica, 1959 — All Images: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Some gallery shows aren’t just a pleasure, they’re a public service. That would describe “The Geometry of Hope”, the survey of Latin American abstraction that I previewed last week at the indispensable Grey Art Gallery at New York …

I caught an early look at The Rape of Europa. It’s a documentary of roughly two hours drawn heavily from the 1994 book of that name by Lynn Nicholas that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Nicholas told the story of the Nazi plunder of European artworks and architecture during World War II. The film has been making the …

A few weeks ago I mentioned the now-in-progress competition to design what will be the tallest building in San Francisco — or for that matter anywhere on the West Coast — a new tower alongside a new bus and railway terminal being built by the Bay Area’s Transbay Joint Powers Authority. The three contenders are designs from the …

As in — I wonder how long it will be before Alice Walton has her way with the Stieglitz Collection at Fisk University? Actually, while we’ve been talking about 9/11 this week, there’s been movement on two Walton-related artworld dramas.

One of them involves Walton and Fisk. Earlier this week a Tennessee judge disallowed a deal …

Tumbling Woman, Fischl, 2002 — Photo: AP

Over the past couple of days, Blogger Tyler Green has had a series of posts about art produced after 9/11 that tried to come to grips with the event. Interesting idea. Let me throw in one candidate not mentioned by him so far, especially because it’s very effectiveness caused it so many …

My long commentary yesterday on the state of reconstruction at the World Trade Center site brought in a number of passionate replies from readers. One of the most typical? That the powers that be should simply have re-built the towers as they were. (Or as one reader proposed “but taller, much taller!”) Even now, when it’s plainly not …

So here it is, the sixth anniversary of that morning. Last night I was walking down the Hudson River boardwalk near my apartment in Jersey City, N. J., which is directly across the water from where the World Trade Center used to be. Every year, there’s a memorial at this time produced by scores of floodlights positioned some blocks …

And the winners, if that’s the word for it, of this controversial commission are Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Tod and Billie, a husband and wife team, are two of the most gifted and thoughtful architects I know. Their American Folk Art Museum in New York is on my short list of the great jewel box interiors anywhere in the U.S. It …

I’m still travelling around on assignment, but couldn’t resist taking note of the latest speculation about Damien Hirst’s $100 million — or is it? — skull. When I posted a few weeks ago about news of the sale, I wondered out loud if the details of this “sale” would ever be made fully public. Today both the Washington Post and the …