Yesterday, Waldemar Januszcak, art critic for The Sunday Times, wrote a scathing review of “A…
Category: museums
The Museum’s collections have been rearranged and expanded. (Learn more here.) Works, such as Eve (1900) by Thomas Brock (1847-1922), have been taken from other museums — Eve was formerkly in the sculpture gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where it stood on a very high pedestal — and put within the context of contemporaneous works.
The January/February edition of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine carries an article I wrote about seeing…
I don’t think Mr. Penny’s advice in this interview is the basis for his opinions; but, he has been trained by a hundred years of art historical practice to talk to the public about art in an imprecise and unhelpful way. This work has been through a host serious scientific tests, including carbon dating and comparative chemical testing of pigments used in undisputed da Vinci paintings. These are not the kind of tools available to average museum-goers who Mr. Penny invites to “judge for themselves.” If he were a lawyer, we would expect him to say “Here is the compelling evidence for and against . . . therefore I am pretty sure it is attributable to da Vinci.” not: “I’m pretty sure . . . It’s weird . . . ask someone else.” It is a sign of our times that a trained scholar and Director of one of the world’s great museums would tell people to look at and interpret a Renaissance painting as though it were a 1960s drip painting.
We do not usually associate the two; but, there it is, a Van Gogh hanging somewhere between one of the world’s largest collections of antiquities and the Sistine Chapel.
With only 36 hours in Lisbon, there was little time for me to explore. I wanted to visit the city’s most well-known art museum. So, when I asked a cab driver to take me to the Museum of Fine Art, I was taken to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. (Roughly translated as the “National Museum of Ancient Art,” the term “ancient” in Portuguese does not have the same meaning in English, which would imply anything from pre-historic to, perhaps, the birth of Christ.)