Dear Reader: Perhaps, like myself, you have noticed that there is a tendency among critics and historians of art to become enamored of their own formulations. In response to certain developments in contemporary art, there is an understandable eagerness among the more intellectually ambitious of these writers to come up with a pithy phrase or Read More
For a large part of the American art public, the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) stands alone and unrivaled as the classic American representative of the
Realist style. With subjects ranging from water sports and baseball to affectionate scenes of domestic life and portraits that are penetrating character studies of his Philadelphia contemporaries, Eakins Read More
The exhibition called The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome , which Joseph J. Rishel has organized at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a considerable conundrum–a museological oddity that combines the inspired, the mundane and the insipid in a spectacle that is by turns very entertaining and very pedantic. It would be an injustice to describe Read More
