Being a Benjaminian, I value the aura of seeing the ‘real thing’ as opposed to reproductions. Find the Mona Lisa boring? Not me. Yawn at Van Gogh’s sunflowers because they’re reproduced everywhere? Not likely. I like to get up close, see the brushstrokes or the chisel marks or the other traces of the human hand […]
There is something quite enchanting about Paris’s smaller museums, and I recently spent a very nice afternoon between two of them in the 9th arrondissement, both housed in what was once an artist’s residence. The different histories of the buildings and their gifting as public spaces, as well as the profiles of the artists and […]
Far away from ‘Museum Mile’, nestled in a Beaux Arts complex on Audubon Terrace near the top of Manhattan, the Hispanic Society of America is from a bygone era, which is exactly what drew me to it. Between its museum and library it has the finest collection of works from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking […]
