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Before its reconstruction a few years ago, the de Young Museum in San Francisco had a wonderful paneled French period room with windows opening on a patio and pool in a quiet copse behind. It was used for parties and receptions. It was spacious and gracious and every good thing. I painted events there a…

Ronald Searle (1920 – 2011), famous for his St. Trinian’s girls and New Yorker cover cats, was a young enlistee in the Royal Engineers who had just arrived in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942. He would be a prisoner until the end of the war in 1945. During that time he…

Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633 – 1707) excelled in a tradition of seascapes that remained almost unchanged far into the 19th Century and the American Luminists, notably Fitz Hugh Lane. But I especially admire his drawings, of which “Warships and Galleys” is a favorite. On the one hand it’s firmly under control, executed…

  I wasn’t aware of this piece by Norman Rockwell before it sold the other day for $3.2 million. That’s a sum glamorous enough to catch one’s attention. What jumped out at me are the threatening, if absurd, faces in the two principal buildings. Their oddness doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Rockwell does,…

Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011) built his later reputation on the grossness of his images—unideal bodies flopping around in poses that most models, amateur or pro, wouldn’t take without being coaxed. Which they wouldn’t be, by most artists. But Freud’s in-you-faceness tends to blind us to the suave design and execution that tames his subjects,…

If that naughty Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, 1908 – 2001) were still alive and posing pre-adolescent girls for crotch views today, all you could really talk about is how quickly he ought to be taken into custody. But he’s gone, whatever damage was done is done, and it’s reasonable now to consider the shadings of his…

In the print and drawing corridor of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (to the left at the top of the stairs) is (or at any rate, recently was) a small but fascinating display of snapshots from an immense collection donated by Peter J. Cohen. Two panels are shown here. The disposition of the pieces…

One of the unconventional delights of New York’s Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums of art are their open storage rooms. The snaps here are from the American Wing at the Met; the displays at the Brooklyn are narrower and darker, which makes them seem even more exoticly back-roomy. With such variety, not everything you find in…

Advertising is big in sports, as in most fields–getting noticed, exuding glam. But sometimes it seems counterproductive. As in the case of these immense and immensely expensive America’s Cup boats.   The Emirates boat is in the worst shape, larded with advertising from head to halyard, but both Emirates and Oracle are so visually muddled…

“Sunset at Montmajour” certainly looks like the work of Vincent Van Gogh, but when in the early 20th Century it was dismissed as a fake, its owner stuck it in the attic. There it sat for the next sixty years. Now it’s out, and after two years of learned study it’s acclaimed as the genuine…