<em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">NEW YORK — We’ve been asked many questions about how to visit the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art. Based on roughly a dozen visits, I’ve figured out some of the answers. </em>
NEW YORK — Our museums, movies and magazines have been on a yearslong binge of ’60s nostalgia, pegged to a rolling sequence of 50th anniversaries: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Neil Armstrong, Woodstock and the Manson murders. It seems Americans can’t get enough of the era, and the optimism that percolated amid great social upheaval. But well beyond our borders, before the 1973 oil crisis tanked the global economy, other countries were partying and protesting just as hard, and a youth c...
CHICAGO — I wonder how often he thought back on it: the outrage, the reproaches, the shame, the folly. In 1865, two years after they rejected his “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” the gatekeepers of the Paris Salon accepted two paintings by Édouard Manet into Europe’s most prestigious exhibition. One was a slablike, Spanish-influenced religious scene of Christ mocked by Roman legionaries. But it was the other that eclipsed more than 3,500 other works in the Salon, and set off a scandal that makes the r...
NEW YORK — Last week, when I looked at the first image ever made of a black hole — erroneously called a “photograph,” it is in fact a digital composition stitched together from the observations of eight telescopes — I could hardly make it out. The supermassive void at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy is about as large as our solar system, with a mass outstripping the sun’s more than 6 billion times over, from which no light escapes. What the picture shows is the event horizon that surrounds...
NEW YORK — Last week, when I looked at the first image ever made of a black hole — erroneously called a “photograph,” it is in fact a digital composition stitched together from the observations of eight telescopes — I could hardly make it out. The supermassive void at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy is about as large as our solar system, with a mass outstripping the sun’s more than 6 billion times over, from which no light escapes. What the picture shows is the event horizon that surrounds...
NEW YORK — When the going gets rough — when the students start throwing paving stones and the mounted police swing their truncheons — sometimes what you need is some time in the country. In the years around 1968, American artists aghast at the Vietnam War raised their voices in New York and Los Angeles, but also set up back-to-the-land communes or constructed awesome earthworks in the Nevada desert or Utah’s Great Salt Lake. In Britain, Richard Long started making art out of walks in the fiel...
NEW YORK — Surprisingly cute in his youth, more intelligent than his peers, he eventually grew into a ruthless, bloodthirsty wrecker who made you want to run for your life. No, we’re not talking about a relationship gone wrong. This is a piece about tyrannosaurs, the undefeated bosses of the Cretaceous Period, stomping and chomping their way across earth’s northern supercontinent.
NEW YORK — Hard to imagine she once worked in shadow; when she had her first New York exhibition, in 1938, Vogue preferred to name her “Madame Diego Rivera.” For there may be no artist today as famous as Frida Kahlo, now recognizable from Oaxaca to Ouagadougou — with those big brown eyes framed by her notched unibrow, those pursed lips topped by a whisper of a mustache. Certainly no woman in art history commands her popular acclaim.
