Art Kaplan is on a mission. At my request, he’s looking for a particular yellow pigment to show me—and there are hundreds of yellows to choose from, in drawers labeled Yellow Ochre, Lemon Ochre, Golden Yellow, French Yellow, and...
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In the emerald-green galleries of the exhibition Spirit of an Age: Drawings from the Germanic World, I was drawn to a cluster of quiet drawings that convey beautiful stories: miraculous healings, heroic quests of medieval knights, momentous coronations. These...
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I’ve long admired the films of Werner Herzog, so I was delighted to discover that his new film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, made in 3-D, is about the prehistoric paintings at Chauvet, in the Ardeche region of southeastern France....
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George Hein, a leading authority on museum education whom the Museum’s Education Department invited as a guest scholar this spring, says that museums are inherently educational. The professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences at...
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The Cosmati Pavement, the medieval tile mosaic floor in front of the Abbey’s High Alter where Prince William and Middleton are expected to take their vows, has in past been rarely visible due to its age and condition, but the floor has been newly conserved thanks in large part to a grant from the Getty Foundation.
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Paris in the mid-18th century was a time of invention in the culinary arts. Food was an integral part of the fashion and culture of this bustling city. Haute cuisine has its foundations in this time and place. So...
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Opening this week at the Getty Center is Paris: Life & Luxury, which traces the refined activities that took place inside a luxurious Parisian town house of the mid-1700s. On the streets outside such a house, however, occurred one...
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As a fourth-grade teacher, I take every opportunity to integrate art into the classroom. So when I was asked to be on the Teacher Advisory Group for the new Performing Arts in Art curriculum for K–12 teachers, I was...
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Centuries ago, a marble sculpture known as the Agrigento Youth took a violent fall, losing his nose and parts of his arms and legs. The cause? Likely an earthquake. The statue, loaned to us by the Museo Archeologico Regionale...
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I have the good fortune to spend my days on a hillside with a view, in buildings filled with artistic treasures and surrounded by gardens. Still, I often amaze myself at how infrequently I take advantage of what’s around...
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Whether he planted his tripod in India, China, Japan, Korea, or Burma, the Italian-born photographer Felice Beato always portrayed a country’s culture through a distinctly Western lens. The Museum’s current exhibition of his work, Felice Beato: A Photographer on...
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Greeting you at the entrance to Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China is a duilian, two lines of Chinese poetry that situate the exhibition. The author of that duilian here describes the process of its creation, which was...
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