Modern Art

An exhibit of 84 paintings from the Barnes Foundation that has been seen by millions of people on a triumphant two-year world tour opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday. It offers the last chance to see these masterpieces before they return to the foundation, presumably forever.Dr. Albert Barnes, who died in 1951, amassed one of the most stupendous collections of modern art in the world. In sheer numbers, it's staggering: 180 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, seven van Goghs and works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Rousseau, Modigliani and others.

Baltimore helped the avant-garde painter Max Weber forge a national reputation in 1915. Now, nearly 100 years later, this could be the city where the late artist begins his long-overdue comeback. It's not that critics and curators are unfamiliar with the Russian-born, Brooklyn-raised painter's work. As a new exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art makes clear, Weber has long been considered one of the most significant American artists of the 20th century. But, at the peak of his career, Weber was a bona fide celebrity, with spreads in "Time," "Life," "Look" and 'The Saturday Evening Post.

The official opening today of the Baltimore Museum of Arts New Wing for Modern Art represents a major milestone in this city's cultural life. The $10 million structure -- more than half of it contributed by the city and state, along with generous contributions by private and corporate donors -- was created to display the museum's collection of post-war painting and sculpture. The result is a stunning new space that will allow the museum to show off these modern masterpieces to greater advantage than ever before.

Beauty can be found even in the utilitarian. A recently opened exhibit of African art at the Baltimore Museum of Art makes that point powerfully, with a varied array of elaborately handcrafted personal objects from across the continent — from hats, blankets and hairpins to weaving tools and jugs used to carry water and milk. "Hand Held: Personal Arts from Africa" shows off more than 80 items from the museum's 2,000-piece collection, many of them never or rarely displayed before.

Washington--The Kreeger Museum, consisting of the house and collection of modern art of the late David Lloyd Kreeger and his wife, Carmen, becomes Washington's newest museum today when it opens on an appointment-only basis.It's an attractive addition to the area's art scene, although it falls short of being a stunning one.The house, designed by architect Philip Johnson in 1967, is a modern structure that looks like a breath of fresh air in this fussy postmodern era.The collection sounds glorious on paper.

THE BALTIMORE Museum of Art is celebrating, on as big a canvas as it can manage, the grand opening of its New Wing for Modern Art. After two years of construction, the museum's latest addition, a space of 35,000-square feet, will open to the public this weekend.The New Wing will display the works of such renowned 20th century artists as Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko, and, of course, Baltimore's Grace Hartigan.Baltimoreans who can keep a sense of humor in the midst of such awesome company will notice that the work of at least one celebrated local artist, whose career is bound up with Baltimore legend and lore, is missing.

NEW YORK -- The collection of 19th- and 20th-century art assembled by William S. Paley, valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, will go to the Museum of Modern Art.Among the masterpieces collected by the late chairman of CBS is "Boy Leading a Horse," from 1906, a large-scale painting from Picasso's rose period that was a centerpiece of the Picasso survey at the Modern in 1980.Friday, Richard E. Oldenburg, director of the Modern, cited Paley's gift as "one of the most significant ever presented to this institution."

It is burnished aluminum. It is Andy Warhol. It is all cool interiors and dramatic geometry. It is the New Wing for Modern Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Two years of construction and nearly a decade of planning have resulted in the museum's latest expansion -- 35,000 square feet cut into 16 galleries for modern art. Butting against the limestone exterior of the museum's Cone Wing, the new wing provides visitors with a visual break that takes them...

All around us you see the monstrous offspring of insanity, impudence, ineptitude, and sheer degeneracy. What this exhibition offers inspires horror and disgust in us all."Thus spoke Reich chamber of visual arts president Adolf Ziegler, on July 19, 1937, as he opened an exhibition containing works by Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Emil Nolde, Oskar Schlemmer and more than 100 other modern artists.Titled "Degenerate 'Art,' " it consisted of 650 works confiscated from 32 German museums and brought together in Munich as examples of the art Hitler and the Nazis hated, condemned and sought to destroy: cubism, expressionism, abstraction, dada -- in short all that was modern about modern art.And the 650 works in "Degenerate 'Art' " were but the tip of the iceberg.

Q: Can you give me any information about the Kroller-Muller museum in the Netherlands?A: The museum, renowned for its sculpture park and a collection of 278 works by van Gogh, is situated in the Hoge Veluwa National Park, a 13,600-acre nature reserve in Otterlo, in the eastern part of the country.The reserve was once owned by Anton Kroller and his wife, the former Helene Muller, who gave the site and her art collection to the state in 1935. It was considered one of the first important collections of modern art in the world, and the Dutch built a museum to house it in 1938.

Google, the giant Internet search engine, wants to put the world's great art museums and their artworks online. This week, the company announced the launch of its Google Art Project, which presents virtual tours of 17 of the world's most prominent museums using the "street view" technology developed for its online maps. Not only can site visitors stroll through the galleries of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, London's National Gallery or the Uffizi in Florence, they can also call up high-resolution images that display selected works in such minute detail that every brush stroke, scrape mark and paint dab of the artist's hand leaps out at you. You'd need a magnifying glass to see the nuts and bolts of the painter's art so clearly on a work hung on the walls of a museum — if the guards let you get close enough to try. But, of course, they never would.

Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York When: Tuesday through Aug. 1 What: The exhibit highlights some 300 works by Pablo Picasso from the museum's collection, including 34 paintings, 58 drawings, a dozen sculptures and ceramics and 200 prints, all acquired within the past 60 years. The exhibition also features the return of Picasso's large Rose-period painting "The Actor (1904-05)

Mobtown Modern, the most way-out-there music organization in Baltimore, has announced another boldly unconventional lineup for the 2009-2010 season, along with a new venue. The concert series will still be presented by the Contemporary Museum, where Mobtown started out, but performances will relocate to a larger space at Metro Gallery. The ensemble's third season opens Sept. 16 with a program that emphasizes works written since 2002 that incorporate looping and layering, composed by the likes of Todd Reynolds, Michael Lowenstern and Mobtown co-curator Erik Spangler.

Total creative freedom is a luxury that Derek Bellomo never took for granted - not the day he purchased a piece of land in southwest Baltimore County's historic Oella and not even when his dream was realized. A burnt-out house with the original fieldstone foundation wedged into a rugged hillside was all that remained on the 30-foot-by-140-foot property for which he paid $80,000 in March 2007. (Construction, design and furnishings would easily total four times that amount, according to Bellomo.

ALAIN JACQUET, 69 French pop artist Alain Jacquet, a French pop artist known for his reinterpretations of famous paintings, has died, the French Embassy said. Mr. Jacquet, who lived in New York and Paris, died of cancer Thursday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the embassy said in a statement. Mr.Jacquet's work often reflected the sensibilities of pop art, which emerged in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and '60s and drew on advertising, comics and other elements of popular culture.

Choreographers Doug Hamby and Carol Hess don't know exactly how to explain their nonverbal works. They're not even sure if their pieces really have specific messages. But they do know that they want audiences of Baltimore Dance Project in Concert to leave the auditorium with a greater appreciation for the body and its movement potential. "The human body can birth so many ideas visually," said Hamby, co-creative director of Baltimore Dance Project and associate professor of dance at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

In a much later note on his 1949 painting "The Voyage," Robert Motherwell wrote that the title "refers to the sense we had in the 1940s of voyaging on unknown seas (however conventional the work may now seem) and, of course, refers also Baudelaire's famous poem 'The Voyage.' "That sentence is entirely characteristic of Motherwell, who died Tuesday at 76, not least because it appears to be a simple statement but has more to it than one might think: The bracketing of the old with the new; the realization that however radical the present moment may seem, it is nothing more than the latest product of the past; the concomitant knowledge that today's creation will be tomorrow's history; the casual, almost offhand reference to the French poet with that "of course" thrown in as if to say everybody knows that.

"Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America," by Eugene R. Gaddis. Knopf. 472 pages. $35. I am continually amazed by how very small the group of people was that introduced modern art to America. Today, of course, we take the genius of Matisse and Picasso for granted. But it wasn't always so. First, someone had to persuade a few very rich people -- museum trustees, philanthropists, corporate moguls -- that the new art deserved their support. Not surprisingly, the most effective advocates were people just like them.

Home to the world's most comprehensive collection of work by Henri Matisse, the Baltimore Museum of Art is raising its international profile as an authority and a leading exhibitor of the French Modernist master. Last night, the museum moved closer to that goal as it announced a major gift of 77 Matisse prints - the largest acquisition since the Cone Collection laid the foundation for the BMA's Matisse holdings in 1950. And next Sunday, the museum will open Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, the first major U.S. exhibition of his sculpture in a generation.

Art is a very subjective thing, so it is best to keep your gallery comments ambiguous, yet relevant. Wine people are experts at this sort of patter, which is why so many art openings feature wine-and-cheese receptions. The fact is, many things that can be said about wine can be said about art. For example, if you are standing in front of one of those ubiquitous vase-with-flowers paintings, you could murmur, "What a fine bouquet!" Whether you were talking about the wine in your glass or the painting on the wall, you would be entirely appropriate.