Smelling the flowers: A closer look at permanent collections

Editorial Staff Art

In this, the quietest season of the year for the New York art world, when most of the commercial galleries are shuttered and the museums have been abandoned to the tourists, it behooves the critic to slow down for a few weeks and smell the flowers. By that I mean returning to the permanent collections and observing the recent addition …

Current and coming: Books at the Morgan

Editorial Staff Books, Exhibitions

Whatever my other sins might be, envy is not usually among them. And yet, I recently felt that unwelcome emotion as I leafed through a coffee table book devoted to, of all things, the private library of Carl Gustav Jung. To turn from those rows of solemn volumes to the calamitous misalliance of dust jackets and trade paperbacks that make …

The PRB at the MMA

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Five Metropolitan Museum of Art curatorial departments comprising European paintings, drawings and prints, photographs, European decorative arts, and the Watson Library along with several private lenders have collaborated to produce a small,well-focused exhibition, The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in 1848 by seven young artists and writers who rejected contemporary academic painting, and …

No Growing Pains at the Frick Collection

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Recently, an ill-considered op-ed in the New York Times, written by David Masello, took issue with the Frick Collection’s plans for an ambitious expansion. Yes, there is something formulaic, almost knee-jerk in the way in which, these days, every museum seems to feel that it must expand and debase itself to embrace bigger audiences. But there is something equally formulaic, …

Then and Now: A museum’s museum

Editorial Staff Art

One of my earliest memories is from half a century ago and relates to something that I saw, and that astonished me, in the darkened halls of the American Museum of Natural History. I was four and my nanny was taking me-not for the first time, as I clearly recall-to the museum, a few blocks from where I grew up. …

Meet the Altamiras at the Met

Editorial Staff Art

Go to the Metropolitan and meet the Altamiras, one of the richest and most illustrious families of 18th Century Spain. Four of Goya’s portraits of the family are assembled in one place for the first time in a century and a half. So illustrious was the family that the father, Vicente Joaquín Osorio Moscoso y Guzmán, 12th Conde de Altamira, …

Object of devotion at MOBiA

Editorial Staff Art

It was big news in the museum world when the New York Times reported that a rare exhibition of Donatello, considered by some to be the finest sculptor of the Renaissance, was coming to New York City. But the venue for Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces From Florence Cathedral (on view from February 20 through June 14, …

Chrysler Museum reopens

Editorial Staff Art

Visitors approaching the grand front entrance of Norfolk, Virginia’s Chrysler Museum of Art on its reopening on May 10 could be forgiven for not realizing that a major transformation has taken place. So seamlessly have the flanking wings been enlarged and the gardens in front of them so surreptitious­ly moved forward that it is on­ly when inside that the impact …

Current and coming: Charles James at the Met

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

The subtitle of the Met’s Charles James exhibition, “Beyond Fashion,” is suitably vague, hint­ing at an exalted realm where even the most extrava­gant fashion su­perlatives will be inadequate. Then, too, the phrase is meant to suggest that what lies beyond fashion must inevitably be art. Certainly James’s designs have been so described almost from his first decade as a couturier …

The Hudson River School at Questroyal Fine Art

Editorial Staff Art

One of the noblest buildings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is 903 ParkAvenue, which commands the northeast corner of the avenue at 79th Street. As it happens, this building makes two compelling claims upon your attention. First of all, it was completed exactly one century ago by Warren and Wetmore, who gave the world Grand Central Terminal a year earlier. …