Art Trekker

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."