Modern and Surreal Combined by a Man Who Loved Them Both

Two of my favorite American art museums, the Phillips Collections in Washington, D.C., and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., are this season collaborating on an exhibition that has brought the cream of the Atheneum’s 20th-century collection to Washington for the first time. The show is called Surrealism and Modernism: From the Collection of the Read More

Gauguin, Meyer de Haan Are Reunited in Nirvana

Of the many modern artists who have sought refuge from the

encroachments and commercialism of modern civilization in primitive,

out-of-the-way places of unspoiled natural beauty, the French painter Paul

Gauguin (1848-1903) is probably the most legendary. The story of his

life-quitting a profitable job on the Paris stock exchange and then abandoning

his wife and Read More

The Man Who Pushed Picasso: A Curator’s Antic Adventures

Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America , by Eugene R. Gaddis. Alfred A. Knopf, 472 pages, $35.

“Do you think it wise to have the ge- neral public rampaging through our museum?” a wary trustee of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., asked its director, Arthur Everett Read More

Even After Four Centuries, Caravaggio’s a Knockout

Owing to both the circumstances in which it was conceived and the uncommon appeal of the exhibition itself, the show called Caravaggio and His Italian Followers at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford has understandably been causing a stir, and when you go to see it you can easily see why. The best paintings in the Read More