25 stories by "Sebastian Smee"
“Aphrodite and the Gods of Love’’ at the Museum of Fine Arts is a very beautiful, very smart, very orderly show that is also a kind of hymn to the Greeks’ apprehensio…
The “Degas and the Nude” exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts offers a candid, and occasionally uncomfortable, look at the tensions at work in an artist’s life.
The Institute of Contemporary Art is celebrating its 75th anniversary this fall, and plans to do so in style. Anniversaries come and go. But for a gallery devoted to showing challenging new …
A list of 15 recommended art exhibitions this fall
We like to stress what was “modern’’ - what somehow anticipated our own era - about great artists of earlier epochs. But isn’t there something narcissistic about the …
PISSARRO’S PEOPLE The rarely exhibited portraits and figure paintings of this beloved artist, a central figure in Impressionism (at left: “Young Peasant Woman Drinking Her Caf…
LEWISTON, Maine - Paul Klee famously said that a drawing is simply a line going for a walk. The formulation was taken up by artists of all stripes, from die-hard abstract modernists to Crock…
WORCESTER - There’s a great big metaphysical joke at the core of the genius that was Henri Matisse, and it has to do with the idea of work, of labor, of effort.
EDWARD HOPPER’S MAINE The first exhibition to focus on the paintings, prints, and drawings produced by Hopper on his summer visits to Maine. Through Oct. 16. Bowdoin College Museum of …
BRUNSWICK, Maine - Edward Hopper, the painter of fierce and dazzling seascapes, full of movement and color and light skidding off rock?
Nothing can really compare to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s “El Jaleo’’ or the Museum of Fine Arts’ “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,’&#…
I must have mentioned to Lucian Freud one day that I had never eaten grouse, because he arranged a dinner at his house in Notting Hill one night for me and his granddaughter Frances Costello…
A welcome development: The Museum of Fine Arts has opened a gallery specifically devoted to the display of jewelry.
One of the things to like about the Institute of Contemporary Art is the intelligent continuity in its programming. It’s not just a case of “Who, or what, can we show next?’…
PROVIDENCE - What should we think of this sculpture? It’s an ugly question: Obligations to think anything are exactly what we go to art to escape. Still, works like this have their kno…
ROCKLAND, Maine - Andrew Wyeth was falling in love when he first met Christina and Alvaro Olson. The object of his attention was 17-year-old Betsy James, who introduced him to the pair. The …
PORTLAND, Maine - Visit any or all of the seven museums on the wonderful Maine Art Museum Trail, and you can’t help but notice that the same names keep reappearing.
Sometimes it’s the fate of objects of adoration not to be taken quite seriously. Ask, I don’t know, Justin Bieber, or Julia Roberts, or my 4-year-old.
MAN RAY-LEE MILLER, PARTNERS IN SURREALISM Works by, or relating to, these two artists who were teacher and student, then lovers. Through Dec. 4. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. 978-745-9500, w…
Cy Twombly, one of the 20th century’s great lyrical artists, died yesterday in Rome. The cause was not immediately disclosed, but he had suffered from cancer. He was 83.
It’s hardly a hidden treasure. Nor is it exactly in a frame. But I wanted Boston’s Citgo sign to feature in this series because, for all its fame, it’s rarely discussed as …
WORCESTER - Annette Lemieux, the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Worcester Art Museum, was given a solo show early in her career by an artist-run East Village gallery called Cas…
WILLIAMSTOWN — Of all the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro was the most sympathetic. His name has never attained the luster of Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, or…
MAN RAY-LEE MILLER, PARTNERS IN SURREALISM Photographs, paintings, sculpture, and drawings by, or relating to, these two artists who were teacher and student, then lovers. Through Dec. 4. Pe…
Museums, it’s easy to forget, were once for adults. High-ceilinged places with a muffled, whispery ambience, punctured sporadically by the echoing clack of adult shoes, they were ideal…
