Tag Archives: art

Visiting the Musee Rodin in the Wake of World War II

For me, the reopening of the Musee Rodin unleashed floods of memories. In April 1946, a month before my nuclear family was to immigrate to the United States, my mother, who was somewhat of a tyrant, surprisingly let me visit … Continue reading

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Picasso: The Sculptor at Work

Picasso is perhaps the best-known artist of the twentieth century. But throughout his career he also remained, in spirit, a genius of a little boy whose next prank was forever unexpected. This fall, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) devoted its … Continue reading

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Sotheby’s 2015 Impressionist and Modern Art Auction: The Joy of a Making-Believe Billionaire

Art from the collections of Jerome H. Stone, a Chicago entrepreneur, Lola Sarnoff, the Samuel Goldwyn family, and Anthony Goldschmidt led off Sotheby’s spring auction. The latter included a Monet looted from Jacob Goldschmidt by the Nazis in 1941. It … Continue reading

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Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

Jacob Lawrence, whose entire epic Migration Series is now on display at MoMA, was wonderfully gifted, hard-working and fortunate. In 1941, Edith Halpert, the owner of the avant-garde Downtown Gallery, went to Harlem to explore the work of then totally ignored … Continue reading

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‘Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey’ at Columbia University

While thousands traipsed to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to view Henri Matisse’s epoch-making Cut-Outs, fewer made it to Morningside Heights to enjoy the equally charming collages of Romare Bearden. There are similarities and differences, though the works of both … Continue reading

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Every So Often, You Fall in Love With a Painting: Jamie Wyeth’s ‘Iris at Sea’

Every so often I fall in love with a painting. Most often the object of my desire is in a museum, on someone else’s wall, or too expensive, but once in a while it is within reach. So it was … Continue reading

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Henri Matisse, MoMA, America, and the Rockefellers

In 1930, when the Museum of Modern Art was not even a year old, Henri Matisse came to America. The main purpose of his voyage was to visit Albert Barnes and to view the future site of the Dance Mural … Continue reading

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Thomas Hart Benton’s Mural: America Today at Home in the Met

In 1930, at the height of the Great Depression, Alvin Johnson, the director of the twelve-year-old New School for Social Research, asked Thomas Hart Benton to paint murals for its boardroom. Murals were in. Just then Alfred Barr and Abby … Continue reading

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An Homage to the Madame Cézanne Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Paul Cézanne painted 29 portraits, and made innumerable drawings, of Hortense Fiquet, whom he met in 1869. Paul, their son, was born in 1872. To legitimize him his parents eventually married in 1886. Dita Amory, the Met’s curator of the … Continue reading

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Leonard Lauder’s Cubist Art Collection at the Met

The eighty-one paintings by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso that are on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art illustrate the birth of Cubism in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. They are the … Continue reading

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