Peter Walsh
By Peter Walsh It’s a hot weather tradition. Generations of American artists have followed the seasonal migration out of hot, sticky, eastern cities to Cape Cod (Edward Hopper, Hans Hoffman), the North Shore (Winslow Homer, Childe Hassan, Stuart Davis, Mark Rothko), and the Berkshires (Daniel Chester French, Norman Rockwell ). Besides their work, they left…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh Sowers United at the Museum of Fine Arts Despite the Romantic Era notion that great art is always original, artists have always borrowed (or “reimagined” or stolen) each other’s ideas. Modern copyright lawyers would have had a field day with van Gogh’s various Sowers—blatant rip-offs (or “homages” if you prefer) of Millet’s…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA through May 9. Locked into a low-status, unprofitable niche, talented Spanish still-life painter Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) made little money and achieved even less fame during his lifetime. He is said to have complained to the king, who never…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh A Tomb Gets its Time Forget Indiana Jones. Archaeology is not about the obvious. Case in point: the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition, The Secrets of Tomb 10A, opening October 18.
Read MoreMostly, Richard Polsky writes entertainingly about the art world in the American vernacular: cash. i sold Andy Warhol. (too soon) by Richard Polsky. other press, 288 pages, $23.95. Reviewed by Peter Walsh “The nature of the art business is that it’s filled with pettiness and jealousy…” complains art dealer Richard Polsky early in his new…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh Almost overlooked in the wider, world financial crisis this spring is the precipitous decline, and perhaps impending fall, of the American art museum. All of a sudden, the money just isn’t there for them any more.
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh “There’s a gude time coming.” —Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817) Americans, always attuned to the prices and classes of commodity, assume that the arts fall into the expensive luxury category: an ornament to good times but destined to wilt, like a hot house orchid, under the cold wind of recession. History…
Read Moreby Peter Walsh “Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.” —Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1989) Harvard University’s Shad Hall: Can a building predict the future? Twenty years ago, the completion of Shad Hall, on the Harvard Business School campus, created a stir. Even for Harvard, the place was shrouded in deep secrecy.…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh “But the trouble continued to spread over the country, and there were reports of big concerns, and even banks, in trouble.” — Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927) No doubt there are still those who think economics is a dull, plodding technical field, akin to accounting, which pale men in green eyeshades practice somewhere…
Read Moreby Peter Walsh “Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College. I knew George twenty years ago, when…
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