By Peter Walsh
Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA through May 9.
Locked into a low-status, unprofitable niche, talented Spanish still-life painter Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) made little money and achieved even less fame during his lifetime. He is said to have complained to the king, who never honored him [...]

I envision Rembrandt with chalk or pen always at hand, sketching from life and imagination constantly. This is also how he taught his pupils, who like him also produced numerous drawings related and unrelated to paintings or prints. Why do so many experts disagree?

By Gary Schwartz

In an earlier column I illustrated a large number of [...]

Visual artist Carmen Sasso’s stimulating interpretation of life’s colorful evolutionary ebb and flow exudes plenty of color, detail and movement.

Carmen Sasso’s “You’re Welcome,” at the Atlantic Works Gallery until December 28
By Yumi Araki
The Atlantic Works Gallery, located in East Boston, MA, offers a magnificent view of Boston harbor. Yet even in competition with this impressive [...]

By Gary Schwartz
To the memory of Dan Tsalka.

Among the acts of art vandalism blamed on the nineteenth century, one of the minor ones was actually undone fifteen years ago. It had to do with the dismemberment of a painting by Jan Steen of the wedding night of Sarah and Tobias, a story from the apocryphal [...]

By Peter Walsh
Almost overlooked in the wider, world financial crisis this spring is the precipitous decline, and perhaps impending fall, of the American art museum. All of a sudden, the money just isn’t there for them any more.
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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 afraid that my [...]

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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by Peter Walsh
“Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.”
—Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1989)

Harvard University’s Shad Hall: Can a building predict the future?

Twenty years ago, the completion of Shad Hall, on the Harvard Business School campus, created a stir. Even for Harvard, the place was shrouded in deep secrecy. Access to the building, [...]

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 of [...]

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 [...]