Visual Arts
Almost every visit to the WCMA has piqued my interest so strongly that I’ve often gone straight to the internet or library to read more about what I’ve seen. Edward Steichen’s 1914 photograph “Heavy Roses” by Helen Epstein The Williams College Museum of Art, set back from Williamstown’s main drag and almost indistinguishable from other…
By Helen Epstein The extraordinary Eleanor Norcross: educator, collector, painter and daughter of Fitchburg’s first mayor. Have you ever been to Fitchburg? It’s off the beaten path and although I’d heard of its state college, and seen the signs — about five miles north of Route 2 — I’d never ventured into the once-properous, now…
A true embarrassment of riches in the Berkshires this summer, with almost every cultural institution in the county scheduling round-the-clock events and package deals designed to attract even the least culturally interested among us. By Helen Epstein James Levine conducts pianist Leon Fleischer and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood (Photo Credit: Hilary Scott) Last…
By Caldwell Titcomb Starting in 1769 serious questions have been raised as to whether William Shakespeare (1564–1616) of Stratford-upon-Avon actually wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. For some years the true author was claimed to be Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626). So far, at least 60 persons have been put forward as the rightful…
By 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.
Is it more harmful for a museum item to be crated and shipped off to a loan exhibition or left hanging in its own gallery or storage facility? Do we see the scars of damage once they have been repaired? Ronni Baer in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, December 2007 By Gary Schwartz “I’m…
By 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…
by Gary Schwartz Albrecht Dürer, Erasmus, 1521 The recently closed exhibition Images of Erasmus at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam rightly introduced Hieronymus Bosch into Erasmus’s sphere. Here are some unsuspected truths – well, at least possible truths – about the two of them.
by 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.…
by Gary Schwartz A few months ago a good friend, someone whose judgment I could not respect more highly, asked me to help convince the Rijksmuseum not to give Damien Hirst the run of the place with his exhibition “For the love of God.” She was understandably incensed by the whole business. That the cast…
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