Salon style at the New-York Historical Society

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

There is an excellent reason why we no longer hang paintings as they have now done in an odd but worthy exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. Indeed, even at the N-YHS, that hanging would be inexcusable, were it not for the fact that the whole point of The Works: Salon Style at the New-York Historical Society, (on view through February …

Made in Texas

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Beeville, Texas, is not on everyone’s bucket list, but a visit to the Beeville Art Museum this fall will provide a fascinating look at life in the lone star state in the last half of the nineteenth century. Made in Texas: Art, Life and Culture, 1845-1900 brings together Texas-made art and objects that reflect the lives of Texans from the …

Thomas Hart Benton at the Met

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

To understand the significance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of Thomas Hart Benton’s ten-panel America Today so many decades after it was created for the New School for Social Research in 1930 and 1931, you need to know a little about the school in those heady days. Founded in 1919, by the 1930s the New School had become …

Museums want you! A roundup of shows commemorating the 100th anniversary of World War I

Editorial Staff Art

This year marks the centennial of the Great War and museums around the globe have been in a wartime fervor setting up exhibitions to commemorate the conflict. The Great War: A Cinematic Legacy • Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY • to September 21 • moma.org The Great War: A Cinematic Legacy is comprised of 50 movie screenings emphasizing …

Two military portraits: El Greco and Pulzone

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending one of the Frick Collection’s “Summer Nights,” a series that offers free after-hours admission and a number of activities centered on a single exhibition–lectures and live music among them. This particular evening was focused on Men in Armor: El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face, an exhibition with just two paintings. Jeongho …

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. …