POINTE DU HOC, France — Even filled with grass and wildflowers, the craters remain so deep and wide that you can still sense the blasts of bombs that carved them 79 years ago. At the pockmarked entrance of an old German bunker, you can almost feel the rattle of machine-gun fire. Peering over the 100-foot-cliff […]
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But that plan quickly began to unravel. That same month, the oba, in a written statement to the news media, said that he should be the sole recipient of the treasures and that anyone working with the trust was “an enemy.” To overcome the oba’s opposition, Nigerian officials developed other options. This March, Abba Tijani, […]
Read More But that plan quickly began to unravel. That same month, the oba, in a written statement to the news media, said that he should be the sole recipient of the treasures and that anyone working with the trust was “an enemy.” To overcome the oba’s opposition, Nigerian officials developed other options. This March, Abba Tijani, […]
Read More But that plan quickly began to unravel. That same month, the oba, in a written statement to the news media, said that he should be the sole recipient of the treasures and that anyone working with the trust was “an enemy.” To overcome the oba’s opposition, Nigerian officials developed other options. This March, Abba Tijani, […]
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If you studied art history or another of the humanities in the 1990s or 2000s — say, if you are around the age of the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, 45 — you may remember the word “problematic” from your long-ago seminar days. Back then it was a voguish noun, borrowed from French, that described the […]
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Confirming rumors that had the art world abuzz this spring, Sotheby’s said Thursday that it has purchased the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1966 Brutalist building by Marcel Breuer on Madison Avenue and will move its headquarters there from York Avenue in 2025. The purchase price of the Breuer building was not disclosed, but two […]
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In a room hung with empathetic black-and-white photographic portraits for her retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Judith Joy Ross, frail-looking and white-haired, was recently taking pictures for her next series. Posing a guard in front of her old-fashioned wooden view camera, she chattered on in an obscenity-laced monologue about her ineptitude. Seemingly to […]
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Reaching Nutbush, a speck of a Tennessee town between Memphis and Nashville, requires exiting Interstate 40, just after the tourism billboard plastered with Tina Turner’s photo, passing the Tina Turner Museum and driving up the Tina Turner Highway, which leads to the town’s sign declaring it the “Birth Place of Tina Turner.” There’s little doubt […]
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Club Ebony, a famed blues venue in Indianola, Miss., that was part of the chitlin circuit — a loose network of Black-owned clubs and venues in segregated American cities — has hosted hundreds of memorable moments. Bobby Rush, the 89-year-old blues singer, recalled one of his favorites in a recent interview: a scene from B.B. […]
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Fire up the barbecues. Memorial Day is here, and with it, the unofficial start of summer. The ocean water might still be a bit too chilly for swimming, but it’s time to dive into those warm-weather activities you’ve been missing. So get outside and explore — safely, of course. (Wear your sunblock!) Been craving a […]
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A man has been indicted on charges that he stole a pair of the famed ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., the actress’s hometown, nearly 18 years ago. The red-sequined pumps were recovered in a sting operation that ended in Minneapolis […]
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In Pablo Picasso’s 1900 painting “Le Moulin de la Galette,” revelers sporting dresses or top hats appear to be drinking, dancing and chatting. Beneath the partyers, under layers of paint, there is a hidden dog that the artist seems to have hastily painted over. For decades, the dog went unnoticed. But recent research and extensive […]
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It was a cold, blustery morning in November 2019 when the city of Dresden, in eastern Germany, woke up to a shock. Overnight, robbers had stolen a hundred-million dollar royal jewelry collection from the city’s historic Green Vault, a set of basement suites in a castle that is now part of a museum. The robbers […]
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A century ago, before it was called sparkling water or club soda, and before it was sold as LaCroix and Spindrift, it was called seltzer. No plastic bottles or aluminum cans magically appeared on grocery shelves. Instead, factories across New York City pumped fizzy water into heavy siphon bottles that were distributed by deliverymen. Nearly […]
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It might seem logical that Vincent van Gogh, the most famous depressive in all of art, adopted the Mediterranean cypress tree as a motif. The tall, tapered, cone-shaped evergreen has always carried associations of mourning and death. It stands sentinel in Christian, Jewish and Muslim cemeteries across southern Europe and the Near East. But van […]
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, facing increasing scrutiny from law enforcement officials, academics and the news media over the extent to which its collection includes looted artifacts, announced on Tuesday a major new effort to review its holdings and policies with a view toward returning items it finds to have problematic histories. The core feature […]
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WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Those who come to Colonial Williamsburg on a nostalgia trip will find some of what they are looking for. The fife-and-drum corps can still be found marching down Duke of Gloucester Street, whose storefronts are full of costumed interpreters making 18th-century wigs, or re-enacting the political debates that helped birth the American […]
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I admit: I never entirely drank the Karl Lagerfeld Kool-Aid. I was not one of those critics (and there were some) who would clutch their breast, shriek “genius!” and swoon after every show. I often felt that for every extraordinary piece the designer created for Chanel or Fendi — by the time I started in […]
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More than two decades ago, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery acquired a 19th- century album filled with nearly 2,000 silhouette portraits, including those of two former presidents. Before displaying the cut-paper portraits, made by a traveling artist named William Bache, the museum needed to create a new, sturdier binding for the book. That’s when curators […]
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When plans for it first surfaced, I wondered if the new Gilder Center at the Natural History museum might end up looking overcooked. From the outside it’s a white-pink granite cliff with yawning windows shaped a little like the openings to caves, nestling the museum’s wonderful Romanesque Revival addition from the turn of the last […]
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This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences. Certain images have become so embedded in our culture we forget that they were initially groundbreaking. Keith Haring’s work falls into that category. The ubiquity of the graffiti artist’s colorful, cartoonish, kinetic […]
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The small hours of the morning — when the galleries were empty, hushed and dim — were Greg Kwiatek’s favorite part of his 25 years as a night guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when he could spend hours looking at a single painting like El Greco’s “Christ Carrying the Cross,” Turner’s “Whalers” or […]
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Every day this week, hundreds of visitors to the National Gallery in London have marveled at “After Impressionism” — an acclaimed exhibition examining how, at the turn of the 20th century, painters including Van Gogh, Cézanne and Picasso pushed art in bold new directions. So, too, have art lovers visiting an institution 1,700 miles away: […]
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The first shards of pottery arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978, a purchase from a Swiss dealer. A second handful was bought from a Los Angeles gallery a year later. These ceramic tidbits — part of the hodgepodge of ancient fragments that the museum routinely collected — bore the unmistakable designs of […]
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A monument has touched down on the Metropolitan Museum’s rooftop that a few decades ago I would never have dreamed of finding there: an architectural mothership packed with a cargo of ideas and images encompassing eons of Black American life. The latest and one of the best in the Met’s 10-year series of annual Roof […]
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Most Japanese schoolchildren know the kappa as a trickster who looks like a cross between a frog and a turtle with an indented head. If you’re not careful, it could drag you into the river to drown. The tengu, identifiable by its bright red face and long nose, lurks in the woods. Beware of the […]
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For more than 30 years, researchers have scoured the depths of Lake Superior for vessels lost to time. Each carries a dramatic story of lives at risk and, many times, lives lost. A stretch of shoreline in Michigan with about 200 known shipwrecks is called “Graveyard of the Great Lakes.” Among the greatest of those […]
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First things first: What is the Met Gala? Officially, it’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute benefit, a black-tie extravaganza held the first Monday in May to raise money for the museum’s fashion wing. Unofficially, it’s the party of the year, the Oscars of the East Coast and “an A.T.M. for the Met” (the […]
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A Los Angeles auctioneer has agreed to plead guilty to making false statements to federal investigators and has admitted to helping create fake artworks that were displayed last year at the Orlando Museum of Art as previously unknown works of the celebrated artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The United States attorney’s office for the Central District of […]
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It was noon on Nov. 10, 1938, when Nazi officers came to the door of William Bergman’s Munich home, arrested him for being a Jew and shipped him off to the Dachau concentration camp, about a 30-minute drive away. Also taken from the home that day was a 19th-century kiddush cup typically used to sanctify […]
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Four large abstract paintings made with layered streaks of black, gray, red and green are the centerpiece of a new Gerhard Richter exhibition that opens Saturday at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In the corners of the gallery hang four photographs from the Nazi death camp at Birkenau that show prisoners moving corpses from a […]
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