Gary-Schwartz

Visual Arts Feature: An Impressive Prize

September 11, 2009
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By Gary Schwartz Once every three years since 1992, the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation, originally launched under another name in 1940 to aid the war effort, has awarded a prize to a person or institution in the humanities. It is a generous prize of 50,000 euros, of which two-thirds is to be spent on projects…

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Visuals Arts: Collection Mobility, The High Risk of Life On the Road

April 24, 2009
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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…

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Visual Arts: The Humanist Meets the Exorcist

February 21, 2009
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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.

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Visual Arts: L’art, c’est moi

January 3, 2009
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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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Visual Arts: Where were you in May 1968?

November 5, 2008
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By Gary Schwartz This question was asked by a Dutch newspaper last spring. At the time I did not get around to answering it. What they were after were experiences related to the students and workers revolt in France and other revolutionary manifestations of the Spirit of 68. My first reaction was that I was…

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Visual Arts: The Caress of Civilizations

October 12, 2008
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by Gary Schwartz It is not too late to commemorate the 400th anniversary, earlier this year, of one of the great inter-civilizational gestures of early modern times. On January 3rd, 1608, a delegation of Discalced Carmelite monks, arriving in Isfahan from Rome via Kraków, presented to the Moslem Shah Abbas I one of the most…

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Visual Arts: Sanitizing Black Is Beautiful

July 28, 2008
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By Gary Schwartz One in so many Western works of art contains an image of a person we would call black. The phenomenon attracts relatively little attention in art history. The Menil Foundation went after it seriously, in a project now inherited by the Warburg Institute. An exhibition in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam offers…

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No Time for Purim — A Missed Appointment in Baghdad

March 19, 2008
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By Gary Schwartz Israeli-Dutch Artist Joseph Semah’s Full Moon Project Five years ago next month I ran into a buddy of mine at Café Luxembourg in Amsterdam. The Israeli-Dutch artist Joseph Semah and I had been through challenging times together. In 2001 he had challenged me to come up with an adjunct to his performance…

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Visual Arts Feature: The Dutch Identity Crisis

January 13, 2008
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By Gary Schwartz Is there or is there not such a thing as “the Dutchman?” My fellow immigrant Princess Maxima thinks there is not, but since she dared express that opinion in public last September, she has been subjected to an ongoing barrage of reprimands. Indeed, since the brief era of Pim Fortuyn, public discourse…

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Visual Arts: The Cotswolds Rembrandt

November 17, 2007
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em>The initial reactions by Rembrandt specialists to the Cotswolds painting were nearly all marked by caution.

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