Sebastian Smee

"Simulating Iraq" at the Wadsworth Atheneum

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:36:16 GMT

Claire Beckett's riveting show, "Simulating Iraq" is entering its final weeks at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT.

Pop-Up Books at the Norman Rockwell Museum

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:23:37 GMT

Here is an image from a delightful exhibition of pop-up books at the Norman Rockwell Museum. The show, called "Pop-Up! The Magical World of Movable Books," runs through April 22. It includes this page from a Winnie-the Pooh book (left). The...

Sir Anthony Caro pays tribute to Helen Frankenthaler

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:43:11 GMT

Helen Frankenthaler, who died last week, was a close friend to both Sir Anthony Caro and his wife, the painter Sheila Girling. When I was writing up Frankenthaler's obituary for last Tuesday's Globe, I tried to get in touch with...

Reflections on Trisha Brown Dance Company at the ICA

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:57:15 GMT

Watching the Trisha Brown Dance Company perform at the ICA on Sunday afternoon, I was put in mind of the performance artist Stelarc's definition of "awareness" as "that which occurs when the body malfunctions." Brown's dancers were not malfunctioning - they...

Artists do it better: Judy Cotton on Degas

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:11:54 GMT

Rule of thumb: Artists - good ones, anyway - are almost always more interesting on the subject of art than art critics. Not all of them, though, can write as well as Judy Cotton, a terrific artist (and fellow Aussie) who...

Dancing the days away in Boston

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:28:46 GMT

"Dance/Draw" at the Institute of Contemporary Art is the contemporary show of the year. It's smart, it's engaging, and it pulls together lots of ideas in joyful, exuberant fashion. But it's more than just a show, and part of the...

To buy Caillebotte, MFA sells Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Renoir. Good decision?

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:38:28 GMT

On 9 February, 1897, Paris's Musee Luxembourg - a repository for French paintings acquired by the state but not yet promoted to the Louvre - opened a new addition. It was called the Caillebotte room, and in it were installed Manet's...

Varujan Boghosian opens the season at Victoria Munroe Fine Art

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:21:34 GMT

Hello Boston! Finally back from five weeks vacation in Australia just in time to tell you about... Varujan Boghosian! A veteran of the Boston art scene, Boghosian is a maker of immaculate and incomparably poetic collages and sculptural assemblages. He lives...

Season of discoveries

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:05:08 GMT

It has been a summer, for me, of revelations, many of them delivered by the state of Maine. Before seeing "Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, and the Olson House," at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, I had tended not to rate...

The Citgo sign has a place in people's hearts

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:34:38 GMT

My Frame By Frame column about the Citgo sign in Boston's Kenmore Square prompted many people to write. One of them was Larry Kohn, who took this picture, he says, on the "4th of July eve a few years ago."...

Obama asks to borrow Rockwell painting

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:32:01 GMT

In the art world, people habitually conflate artistic conservatism with political conservatism, and - flipping the terms - artistic originality with political progressivism. It's an understandable impulse, since no-one can deny that the fields of art and politics overlap. But there are...

On Cy Twombly, 1928 - 2011

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 04:52:52 GMT

Cy Twombly, who died Tuesday, was loved and loathed in equal measure. Those who loathed him considered him a fraud, and were frequently heard to mutter - or shout: "My child could do that!" Those who loved him often did...

Family matters

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:13:02 GMT

For me, the highlight of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute's excellent "Pissarro's People" exhibition was the chance to see the series of ferociously political drawings he did in the late 1880s and 1890 called "Les Turpitudes Sociales" (click link for...

Piero di Cosimo's "The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus" revisited

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 17:29:23 GMT

After taking a look at Piero di Cosimo's "The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus" at the Worcester Art Museum in Tuesday's Frame by Frame column, I received an email from a man named Donald Novak: "One thing you didn't comment on but...

El Anatsui at the Clark (and everywhere else!)

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:21:28 GMT

El Anatsui, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is the most celebrated African artist alive. Museums all over New England - not to mention the rest of the world - are falling over themselves to show his work....