Art History

You don't have to be an connoisseur to be bowled over by the quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala., which go on display tomorrow at the Walters Art Museum. With their bold patterns and vivid colors, it's the kind of contemporary art anyone can enjoy. In a remote, geographically isolated corner of the rural South, dozens of African-American women created the beautiful bed-coverings out of a practical necessity to warm body and soul. Yet the quilts of Gee's Bend have been hailed as some of the most significant works of 20th-century American art - and it's easy to see why. If You Go Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt opens tomorrow and runs through Aug. 26 at the Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. Call 410-547-9000 or go to thewalters.

OK, so it isn't Paris. This city -- one of two European Cultural Capitals for 2007 and capital of the richest per-capita-income country on the planet -- is pretty nice. Like all worthwhile European cities, this is a center of commerce -- but also a city of beautiful fruit stands and pastry shops, of historic churches and requisite statues and back streets worth poking around in, and of outdoor places to sip a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or a local brew while furtively enjoying the passing scenery.

Everybody loves to love the Impressionists -- think of their shimmering colors, pretty girls, handsome men and bucolic landscapes, all rendered in a serviceable evergreen style you don't have to have an advanced degree in art history to appreciate. PISSARRO: CREATING THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE / / Through May 13 / / The Baltimore Museum of Art / / 443-573-1700 or artbma.org

Nancy Ellen Forgione, a Johns Hopkins University faculty member who created a course on the history and art of walking, died of sepsis Sunday at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Roland Park resident was 54. Born in Baltimore and raised in Govans, she attended St. Mary of the Assumption Parochial School and was a 1970 graduate of Western High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in humanities at the Johns Hopkins University and met her future husband, Sun reporter Michael Hill, while they were students there.

Tony Terranova, a professional coin collector from New York City, will have a chance to diversify his collection when more than 100 hand-engraved steel plates go on the auction block today. The plates belonged to the American Bank Note Co. and were used to print stock certificates, bank notes and engravings of presidents. Private and professional collectors began gathering at the Pier 5 Hotel at the Inner Harbor yesterday for the two-day auction. Thousands of coins, some valued at as much as $600,000, were auctioned the first day; the plates are to be auctioned today.

NEW YORK -- A new and powerfully beautiful exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum does something that similar presentations almost never do. The established way we think about a pivotal artist gets turned inside out, and the revision is right on target. No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper says something essential - and in previously unconsidered ways. Curator Susan Davidson erases the conventional distinction between drawing and painting in the classic works Pollock made with the drip method.

Gregor and the Marks of Secret Suzanne Collins Masterpieces Up Close Western Painting from the 14th to 20th Centuries Claire d'Harcourt Chronicle / $22.99 / Ages 10-14 This book is not designed as a run-up-your-SAT-score primer. Claire d'Harcourt makes intriguing fun out of art history's material. There are 10 or so questions, on 21 images, asking readers to notice and read the small details. The answers - and some are quite tentative and preliminary - don't come until later, so there's no open-and-shut feeling of art-history-as-flash-cards.

PUBLIC MONUMENTS ARE historical artifacts that literally become parts of our landscape. But to Karen Lemmey of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a mid-19th-century monument bearing the likeness of an African-American man deserves closer examination. Lemmey will talk about the image and the monument it appears on in a lecture, The First African American on a Public Monument? H.K. Brown's "negro ... so truthfully rendered," at the National Gallery this month. Considering the distortion of African-American images in art during that time, the appearance of this African-American on the monument to American statesman DeWitt Clinton struck Lemmey's curiosity.

Judging by the volume of mail, e-mails and phone calls I received this week, Baltimoreans hold dear their Penn Station and are mightily unhappy about anything that interferes with its majestic setting. "There are scores of people who agree wholeheartedly with ... Mr. [Frank] Wrabel. When this abomination was erected, there were outcries from many," wrote Frances W. Riepe in a letter. "I wrote letters to the editor of your paper and had a lot of response. I contacted people in the art world including the former head of the Rinehart School of Sculpture of the Maryland Institute.

Elizabeth C. Oswald a former court clerk and artist, died of brain cancer Thursday at her home in Curtis Bay. She was 71. She was born Elizabeth Carozza in Catonsville and graduated from Notre Dame Preparatory School in 1952 and from Trinity College in Washington in 1956 with a degree in art history. In 1957, she married Woodin H. Oswald Sr. and spent the next 20 years raising her four children. An art lover who enjoyed sketching, watercolors and pottery, she received her master's degree in art history from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1974.