Tag Archives: nyc museums

Need Cheering Up? Go See Stuart Davis at the Whitney Museum of Art

Want to forget Brexit, Trump, and the rest of the long, dark list of summer events that seems to be lengthening by the day? Go to the still sparklingly new Whitney Museum of American Art and immerse yourself in the … Continue reading

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The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Two very different women, the socially striving Arabella Worsham and the retiring Laura Spelman Rockefeller, occupied the lavish Gilded Age dressing room that joined the period rooms in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning in … Continue reading

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Pergamon, and my Belgian History Teacher, Come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

As soon as I entered the Met Museum’s magnificent survey of Hellenistic Art (Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World, April 18-June 17, 2016) the voice of Miss Feytmans, who taught at my high school some 75 years … 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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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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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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Family Reunion: The Red Boy (Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga) and his Family by Francisco Goya

Portraits of children occupy an important place in art history, and few are more beloved than Francisco Goya’s Red Boy, one of the Met’s iconic paintings. Manuel Osorio’s portrait, painted when he was three or four, is neither saccharine nor … Continue reading

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Degenerate Art: Exhibition at the Neue Galerie and my Family

In addition to its Jews, gypsies, mentally ill, and gays, Nazi Germany decided to rid its homeland of the “alleged horrors” perpetrated by its own writers and artists. Specially chosen “experts” plundered Germany’s museums and private collections and confiscated, sold … Continue reading

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