A major headache for important museums within New York City’s gravitational field is that Manhattan’s Big Three – the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art – dominate national artworld news. The Newark Museum of Art, the Montclair Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art – all of them have major works in their collections, and all of them mount impressive shows, but to many Manhattan art-lovers, those wonderful institutions are only a vague rumor, somewhere out there in a Saul Steinberg hinterland. Another member of this under-noticed group of institutions is the New Britain Museum of American Art, located in (where else) New Britain, CT. It has existed in one iteration or another for almost 175 years. The museum’s early decision to concentrate on American art allowed it to acquire major American works at a time when few other museums were doing so, and the collection today includes important works by Childe Hassam, J.H. Twachtman, Mary Cassatt, George Bellows, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Thomas Hart Benton, works which are prominently featured in scholarly books on those artists. So the museum is well worth a day-trip from Manhattan any time, but if you visit in the next month or so, you’ll be able to see Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina, a first-rate show. Organized by Catherine Walworth of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, this touring exhibition show presents important works by two women artists who had to find their ways in a male-dominated artworld and who pushed through to achieve recognition. Both were non-observant Jews from...
The divine Raphael. Only Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci stand with him in the trinity of the Italian High Renaissance art. Through June 28, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is hosting Raphael: Sublime Poetry, an exhibition of over 170 works by the master, many of them not seen in this country before. The show has drawn predictably huge crowds. Photo by the author I’ve written before about the challenges of blockbusters, and this show has those challenges aplenty. My advice, if you have the luxury of returning to the museum over the course of the show, is to enjoy a room or two of Raphael and then call it a day. No one, not even the most dedicated scholar, could possibly give the works the attention they deserve in one visit, particularly not a visit where you’re standing shoulder to shoulder. In addition to scholarly wonks, the show was filled by the general public, many of them snapping selfies. It’s inevitable, and there’s really no stopping it, but to my mind it goes against the viewing opportunity, a situation summed up in a poem published in the latest issue of The Brazen Head by a museum-goer (me) with a rather jaundiced eye: Selfies The Louvre announced that it will builda new extension made to housethe Mona Lisa only. Thisshould handle all the milling crowds lifting their smartphones to attempta photo with the famous face.The Prado and the Vatican,and any other well-known place are filled today with tourists takingselfies with a culture’s floweras if a feigned proximitycould somehow let them share its power. Expect to find them on returnscrolling...
There’s a drugstore near me that has a sign at the front door: “Pokémon Cards Sold At Checkout.” I understand why cigarettes and certain medicines need to be in a spot where they are always protected, but Pokémon cards? My children were too old to be the target audience when the Pokémon craze hit the United States in 1998, so I have never paid much attention to the cards. I had heard that some Millennials who had begun to hit peak earning age, Crypto Bros and the like, were still avidly collecting the Pokémon cards of their youth, but I didn’t realize the enormous prices that some of the cards were bringing. My ignorance was apparent at the Appraisers Association of America’s annual conference last week when I attended a seminar entitled “High Stakes and Holofoils: Inside the Explosive Market of Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!” taught by Travis Landry, an auctioneer of items from popular culture. Landry, a young man with a wealth of knowledge and a carnival barker’s enthusiasm, detailed for us the history of the Pokémon craze, which has become the world’s highest-grossing media franchise, generating an international franchise worth billions. The way for Pokémon was paved by Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game introduced in 1993. It proved to be a sleeper hit, and the rarer cards began to command money from gamers. With Pokémon, the developers went straight to stressing the cards’ collectability, with the motto, “Gotta catch ‘em all!” As Landry said, “How many people actually know how to play the Pokémon game? It’s all about collecting the cards themselves.” The creators succeeded...
I was on a business swing through the Midwest recently and visited the Art Institute of Chicago to view Salvador Dali: The Image Disappears, the first exhibition at the museum to be devoted to the work of the artist most associated in the public mind with Surrealism. It was a strong show, displaying works from the 1930’s, a pivotal decade in the artist’s career. Paintings like the one below, included in the exhibition, would make his name. Salvador Dali, William Tell, 1930, Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, ParisImage courtesy Wikiart. Born in the Catalonian region of Spain in 1904, Dali received a thorough grounding in Old Master techniques in Madrid at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Intelligent, articulate, a tireless networker before the term was even invented, and an exhibitionist with a talent for attracting notice, he went through brief Cubist and Futurist phases after art school before becoming a proponent of Surrealism, a style in which his classical chops could be put to full use. He would become the most important member of the movement. Art historians and certainly Andre Breton, the founder of the movement who later expelled Dali from its ranks, would disagree with the above statement, but in terms of popular recognition, the verdict is in. The person in the street may not be able to define the term “surrealist,” and they may not have heard of Max Ernst, Hans (Jean) Arp, or Yves Tanguy, but everyone knows the name Dali. St. Petersburg, Florida, is not generally noted as an artworld hotspot, but over 400,000 people visit the Dali Museum there each...
Often (though not nearly as often as dealers would like) when you’re visiting an art fair or antiques show, you will see a small red dot placed on the label of a work being offered. That dot means that the work has already been sold and thus is no longer for sale. It’s funny how a tiny red sticker can arouse longing in the human heart. There is something about forbidden fruit that tempts us. I guarantee that if you hold an exhibition of paintings, all by the same artist, all the same size, and all of the same subject, and put a red dot next to one of them, visitors to your show will point to the painting with the dot and exclaim, “Oh, THAT’S the one I would have bought! Do you have any others just like this?” Dealers can play upon this yearning for the unobtainable. Long ago I knew a dealer down South who would invite a wealthy collector to his home for a formal dinner. During the course of the evening, the dealer would give the collector a tour of his private collection. There would always be a spectacular painting in the place of honor above the fireplace. Let’s say it was a Mary Cassatt. When the guest exclaimed about what a lovely Cassatt it was, the dealer would agree, “Yes, I’ve never seen a better one.” “What would you take for it?” the guest would demand. “Oh, Bill,” the dealer would demur, “That’s not for sale! It’s in my personal collection,” lingering lovingly on the word “personal.” “But what would you take?” the...
I like to say that the only truly original artist was the man or woman who drew that first mastodon on the cave wall. All other artists have been stealing from that person ever since. Wayne Thiebaud, currently the subject of a wonderful exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, would agree with me. The exhibition, “Art Comes From Art,” foregrounds a practice grounded in his statement, “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else.” Thiebaud still gets mentioned in discussions of Pop Art, but, as Timonthy Burgard, Senior Curator at the de Young Museum points out in the exhibition’s accompanying video, Thiebaud has none of the irony that suffuses the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, or Tom Wesselman, and his paintings have none of the flatness that characterizes Warhol’s silk screens, Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots, or Wesselman’s collaged works. Thiebaud was in love with oil; all of his subjects are caressed with delicious impasto. Installation view of Wayne Thiebaud Art Comes From Art exhibition, 2025.Photo by Gary Sexton. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Thiebaud was from a working-class background and first studied art at a trade school in Los Angeles. Following service in World War II, he attended state colleges in San Jose and Sacramento. His first art mentor was the head of the advertising department at the Los Angeles firm for which he worked. Thiebaud was never ashamed of his roots in commercial art; indeed, as he once quipped, “I don’t care much for Pop Art. It’s too...
