October 31st, 2025 | Changes, Friends, General, Loss, Memory, Time Passes
In 1921, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)—and the world at large it seemed—was at a turning point. The devastation of World War I had hollowed a generation of artists, of painters and sculptors, poets and musicians. Picasso himself turned forty, a moment when many pause,...
January 7th, 2019 | Education, Europe, General, Memory, Travel, United States, visual arts
The painting on that wall in the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art would not let me move on. Only a couple of years ago, My Dear One and I had wandered the maze of discontinuous hallways and Escher-like stairs that constitute today’s Louvre Museum to...
August 5th, 2018 | Education, General, visual arts, Women
I have been reading a lot of books that focus on art and Paris from the 1890s into the first decades of the 20th century and these two followed one on the other. What is truly fascinating after a sequence that included Corbett’s Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin,...
May 10th, 2017 | Architecture and Design, Europe, Family, Friends, General, Memory, Travel, visual arts
Gounod’s Faust was the first opera I ever saw, and I saw it at Palais Charles Garnier in Paris in March 1970. As we ascended the massive stair forty-eight years later, studied Marc Chagall’s rainbow of a ceiling and gazed out over the loggia outside the ornate Grand...
January 19th, 2015 | Education, General, Travel, United States, visual arts
Museum labels—you know, those notes posted next to works of art? What’s not to dislike. More often than not they are written in that impenetrable artspeak (of which curators and critics are so enamored) and filled with “facts” and observations the writer believes are...