The Detroit Institute of Arts has organized a delightful and illuminating exhibition that explores the myriad ramifications that coffee, tea, and chocolate had on European culture.
From specimens to souls: The evolution of early portrait photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art
Every photographic portrait confers on its subject some degree of immortality. We take for granted the ability to know what a person looks like, since images of family, friends, and famous strangers dead and alive are at our fingertips through a Google Images or Facebook search. But until 1839 only the wealthy could have a likeness recorded, share it with others, and leave it behind for future generations.
The ancien regime’s master of precious metals: Celebrating Pierre Gouthiere at the Frick
This month the Frick opens Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court, the first show devoted to the work in gilded metal—traditionally called bronze d’oré in French—by an artist whose achievements placed him among the finest French masters of the eighteenth century.
Strange bedfellows: Munch and Johns at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Asked to name two artists least likely to be paired in a museum exhibition, you could do worse than to suggest Edvard Munch and Jasper Johns. The former is the father of expressionism, maker of The Scream and other paintings filled with anxiety and existential dread; the latter is best known for his cool and detached depictions of commonplace objects such as flags and targets—works that laid the foundation for pop art and other contemporary art movements.
Art at the Brandywine River Museum of Art
A decidedly different perspective on the pasture can be seen at the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.
Bumper crop: Art and the farm at Reynolda House
Though the United States has been predominantly a nation of city dwellers since the 1920s, the farm still figures large in the American consciousness.
Finding beauty in decay: The documentary photography of Sherman Cahal
For almost twenty years Sherman Cahal has traveled the Middle West and Appalachia, photographing residential, industrial, and commercial buildings that exist in various states of disrepair and decay, creating a visual record that is, of course, sad, but that also invokes the peculiar appeal of old, worn things.
Around and about at the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris
Drama and scandal swirled around the opening of the twenty-eighth edition of the Biennale des Antiquaires. Less than a week before the celebrated fair opened, there was a thwarted terrorist attack near Notre Dame that only heightened anxiety about security, which was already tight, at the glorious glass-domed Grand Palais where the fair takes place, and made Parisians even gloomier about the year’s precipitous drop in tourism due to earlier attacks.
Glass Act: A new show at the Jewish Museum examines the life and work of art deco master Pierre Chareau
With its stunning façade composed almost entirely of textured glass blocks set in a steel framework, the Maison de Verre, or “House of Glass,” designed and built between 1927 and 1932, is one of the most remarkable buildings in Paris.
Crowning achievements at the Currier
Since the early nineteenth century, Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeastern United States at 6,288 feet, has played muse to some of America’s most famous artists, including Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt. Dramatic views of the “Crown of New England” rendered by painters and photographers helped spur the growth of scenic tourism in New Hamphire’s The White Mountains, …