“Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines” and prepare to be whisked away over Indiana’s famous racetrack and the Golden Dome, vast cornfields and large quarries, and bustling metropolises and a city of ruins. Here in the Hoosier State, Abraham Lincoln became a man, basketball became an obsession, and the nation nearly doubled in one of the biggest land grabs in U.S. history. This aerial tour captures the beauty, spirit, and stories of Indiana as seen from above.
In this episode of “Travels with a Curator,” we travel to Warsaw, Poland, with Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Xavier enchants us with the romantic Łazienki Park and Palace, also known as the Palace on the Isle. The idyllic gardens and ornately decorated interior spaces are similar in many ways to our own Frick mansion. One of the Frick’s Rembrandt paintings, “The Polish Rider,” once hung in the royal apartments on the second floor.
There is an unhappy irony in the fact that five hundred years after Raphael died of a fever at the age of only thirty-seven, the global covid-19 pandemic has brought to a premature end so many of the exhibitions that have been staged to mark the anniversary.
A look ‘beneath’ Titian’s canvases reveals the tweaks and changes he made as he worked over four hundred years ago. Find out more with Restorer Jill Dunkerton.
The Ashmolean’s 2020 Young Rembrandt exhibition is currently closed, but you can still visit virtually. Watch this introduction from exhibition curator An Van Camp, and explore the exhibition section by section at ashmolean.org
The Young Rembrandt exhibition charts the astonishing transformation of the Dutch master Rembrandt. Spanning the years 1624 to 1634, it traces how a young and unremarkable artist from Leiden became the superstar of 17th-century Amsterdam and one of the greatest artists of all time.
Manet called him “the greatest painter of all.” Picasso was so inspired by his masterpiece Las Meninas that he painted 44 variations of it. Francis Bacon painted a study of his portrait of Pope Innocent X. Monet and Renoir, Corot and Courbet, Degas and Dalí…for so many champions of art history, the ultimate soundboard was—and remains—Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660).
Las Meninas – Diego Velázquez (1656)
This updated catalog raisonné brings together Velázquez’s complete works, jaw-droppingly reproduced in extra-large format, with a selection of enlarged detailsand brand new photography of recently restored paintings, achieved through the joint initiative of TASCHEN and Wildenstein. The book’s dazzling images are accompanied by insightful commentary from José López-Rey on Velázquez’s interest in human life and his equal attention to all subjects, from an old woman frying eggs to a pope or king, as well as his commitment to color and light, which would influence the Impressionists over two centuries later.
The authors
José López-Rey (1905–1991) taught Italian Renaissance at the University of Madrid and worked as an art advisor for the Spanish Ministry of Education. Before the end of the Spanish Civil War, he emigrated to the USA, where he resumed his teaching career at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. In 1973 he was awarded emeritus status. López-Rey was a corresponding member of the Hispanic Society of America and a consultant and contributor to several international art journals, including the Gazette des Beaux Arts and Art News.
Odile Delenda, graduate of the École du Louvre, served as professor there, and then as deputy head of the department of paintings at the Musée du Louvre until 2007. She has collaborated on several exhibitions of old master paintings. A research fellow at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris since 1990, she has continued her study of Spanish art from the Siglo de Oro. She is, among other works, the author of Vélasquez, peintre religieux (1993) and, under the auspices of the Wildenstein Institute, the first critical catalogue raisonné of the painted oeuvre of Francisco de Zurbarán and his studio (2009/10).
In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, tells us the story of Sir John Suckling, the subject of Anthony van Dyck’s full-length portrait in The Frick Collection. Xavier has appropriately paired his story of art and literature with an English cocktail called Pink Gin.
The Museum’s gardens were originally set aside for future expansion of the building, but when money ran out they became an outside space for the public. They haven’t just been for show – over the years they’ve been a burial ground for whales, they’ve hosted a secret war bunker, and they’ve been converted to a farm complete with eight Sussex pigs.
The Natural History Museum in London is home to over 80 million specimens, including meteorites, dinosaur bones and a giant squid.