Art Trekker

A section of the current Taft Museum exhibit,  Winslow Homer to Georgia O'Keeffe: American Paintings from the Phillips Collection  is devoted to city scenes. Edward Hopper is well represented with his dark and brooding images of isolation and despair. Two other city scenes grabbed my attention: Power, 1933, by Edward Bruce New York, Lower Manhattan, 1921, by Stefan Hirsch You can see how much New York grew up in the course of just a decade, looking from one painting to the other. Both paintings portray New York City's skyline in their own time. The buildings in Hirsch's painting look small and stubby compared to the larger skyscrapers depicted in Bruce's work. Viewing these painting made me curious to learn more about 1920's and 1930's skyscraper architecture. Another interesting contrast between the two paintings is the pessimistic bleakness shown in Hirsch's work and the optimism and pride on display in Bruce's skyline. Bruce's ...

Another weekend, another journey to the Queen City. Not to play poker, but to catch the Cincinnati Art Museum's extravagant exhibit, Paris 1900: City of Entertainment . Gustave Eiffel's masterpiece was cleverly represented from the waist down in George Roux's Under the Eiffel Tower painting. Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1899 Also on view was Leon-Francois Camerre's Bicycle in Vesinet . I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like. I get the impression upper-class women riding what was known as a velocipede was a bit of a curiosity at the time. Reading about the explosion of bicycling in Parisian society in the late 19th century sparked my interest and I plan to learn more about it. The star of the show was Renoir's Portrait of Madame de Bonnerres. As I walked into the room filled with several other paintings, Renoir's offering seemed to glow. Renoir's paintings often overwhelm with a smorgasbord of color. This p...

Imagine Vincent Van Gogh pulling out his iPhone to watch  Loving Vincent on Netflix . Movies didn't exist during Van Gogh's lifetime and phones barely existed. The only streaming Van Gogh did was rafting down a river. Van Gogh couldn't have imagined an animated film in his artistic style nominated for an Academy Award.  The adoption of new technologies has led to new art viewing experiences the original artist could never have anticipated. Not long ago, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed. My feed contains a number of art-related pages, so it's not uncommon for paintings to zoom by between cat and Minions memes. On this occasion, a painting slowly rolled by with a blue sky background and white moon floating in clouds. Nebulous brown shapes surrounded the skyline. Rene Magritte's  A Friend of Order  immediately came to mind.  And from the waist down? B ut as the full painting came into view, I realized I was mistake...

"Van Gogh Maybe" - Carly Rae Jepsen The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut recently received a priceless gift. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam authenticated a painting in the Wadsworth’s collection, Vase With Poppies,  as a work by Vincent Van Gogh. The Wadsworth removed the painting from display when its authenticity was questioned in the early 1990’s. The painting has remained in storage ever since, probably in the same warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark . Now, presumably, the painting will never again go off display, except to travel to Van Gogh exhibits or for restoration. Is the painting great because it is a great painting, or because it came from the hand and mind of Vincent Van Gogh? I think it’s worthy of display on its own merits, but Museums only have so much space and Van Gogh brings the traffic. As Alec Baldwin once said, “It’s a tough racket." "Chagall is for closers."

When I imagine dystopian landscapes, I usually think about Logan's Run or The Twilight Zone. Edward Hopper isn’t the first to come to mind, but perhaps he should be. I recently journeyed to the Taft Museum in Cincinnati for the sole purpose of viewing the prestigious Phillips Collection exhibit, FromWinslow Homer to Georgia O’Keeffe .   One of the highlights of the exhibit was Hopper’s Sunday . That's not fair, there was time now... to smoke? At first glance, the brightness of the painting fooled me into thinking it depicts a happy Sunday scene. But my eyes eventually settled on the lone figure seated in front of the vacant, nondescript building, and a feeling of silent desperation settled in. The solitary, morose character seated in front of the bare building looks desperate as any of the hard-faced characters one might find wandering in a desolate Rod Serling-inspired post-apocalyptic wasteland. The seated man appears destitute, sad, and without hope. ...

I'm only 40, why do I look and feel like I'm 80? Rembrandt's Portrait of a 40 Year Old Woman, Possibly Marretje Cornelisdr. Van Grotewal , will return to the Speed Museum and get re-installed on June 19th. The painting was on loan to the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary from Feb 10 - May 13 as a part of the "In the Light of Caravaggio: Dutch and Flemish Paintings from Southeastern Muesums." Honestly, it's not my favorite Rembrandt. But Marretje does have very detailed eyes that almost look real. Beyond the extremely complex eyes down to the pupil, I have a really hard time appreciating this painting. It just doesn't seem all that special, lacking the wow factor you'd expect from a Rembrandt. My quest for comprehension resumes June 19th.