Baltimore Museum

When Baltimorean Grace Turnbull was in her 20s and already had considerable experience as an artist, she felt strongly that she should take a life class -- that is, study from the nude model -- in order to gain an understanding of the human body. But this was in the first decade of the century, and she knew it would upset her parents."Mother's objection I felt I could overcome," she wrote years later. "But she told me solemnly that if I carried out my intention of working in a life class it would kill Father."

Baltimore's Walters Art Museum is looking for a few good doodlers. And Googlers. As part of a nationwide competition called "Doodle for Google 2012," the museum is encouraging Maryland students in kindergarten through 12th grade to redesign Googles's homepage banner around the theme "If I could travel in time, I'd visit…" The 10 best state submissions will be exhibited at the Walters from May 23 to June 24. Walters director Gary Vikan...

Ryda Hecht Levi, a philanthropist whose family foundation gives educational and arts grants, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday at her Green Spring Valley home. She was 92. With her husband, banker-merchant Robert H. Levi, she collected works of major 20th-century sculptors, many of which are now displayed in a Baltimore Museum of Art garden that bears the couple's names. The Baltimore native was the daughter of Alexander Hecht, an owner of the old Hecht's department stores. She was a Park School graduate and earned a bachelor's degree from Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

The Baltimore Museum of Industry, whose executive director resigned this month, announced the appointment of an interim director yesterday. Louis H. Kistner, 60, a vice president of the museum's board of directors and former external communications expert at Millennium Chemicals of Hunt Valley, will fill in until a permanent replacement can be hired, spokeswoman Claire R. Mullins said in a news release. The museum displays innovations and artifacts from manufacturing businesses in Maryland.

In an intriguing 1967 book, The Success and Failure of Picasso, critic John Berger argued that the artist's inventive genius largely abandoned him after the stunning breakthroughs that led to the invention of cubism during the years 1908-1914. After the 1930s, Berger wrote, Picasso's capacity for formal invention gradually waned, leaving the by-then world-famous artist with little more to occupy himself than rehashing old formulas that over time became increasingly repetitious and stale.

Milton Kolman, a fan and collector of vintage radio broadcasts who also was a longtime volunteer and docent at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, died of heart failure Tuesday at Atrium Village, an Owings Mills assisted-living facility. The former Pikesville resident was 89. Mr. Kolman was born in Baltimore of immigrant parents from Hungary and Russia. He spent his early years above his parents' Francis Street grocery store, and as a teenager moved with the family to Reisterstown Road. He left City College to work in his father's store, and at 21 opened Rutland Fine Foods at Rutland and Lafayette avenues.

Think of museums as civilization's attics, the places where all of society's unused stuff inexorably accumulates into one vast repository of the recent and remote past. Eventually, at what seems like a glacial pace, whole worlds wind up there. Actually, it happens a lot quicker than that. Museums exist to collect objects and preserve them against the flaky intrusion of accident and chance. They snatch objects out of time and wrap them in a protective cocoon of text that makes them comprehensible as history.

A federal court in Virginia was asked Friday to determine the proper ownership of a miniature landscape painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and purchased for $7 in a box of odds and ends in a rural flea market. The complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria is essentially the first step in determining where the 1879 "Paysage Bords de Seine" will end up. Such a document is frequently filed by a third party — in this case, the U.S. government — that is holding property whose ownership is in dispute.

A large drawing hangs behind Doreen Bolger's desk, dripping with the words "Forward in all directions. " The phrase, drawn with bleach on dark paper by Baltimore artist Colin Benjamin, has become something of a mantra for Bolger, the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art . "I like it for many reasons," Bolger said. "How do you move forward if 'forward' is in five directions?" Lately, that's just what she's been doing. For nearly two years, she has overseen the renovation of the museum's Contemporary Wing, which reopens this week.

The historic Oakland Spring House at the Baltimore Museum of Art, a neo-classical landmark whose interior has been off limits to the public for more than 30 years, will be open soon to visitors again. Museum directors plan to mount temporary exhibits inside the building after contractors complete an $87,000 conservation project designed to address deterioration of the 1815 structure and take it back to its original appearance. Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation approved plans this month for the work, which is to begin in the spring and be completed by fall.