Modern Art

Part of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone collection of modern art will be sent to Houston late this year when it will have to be removed from the Cone Wing due to construction.Brenda Richardson, BMA deputy director, said yesterday between 35 and 50 paintings and sculptures will be lent to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from about November to February, when they would otherwise be in storage.The two museums have not yet made the final choice of works to be lent, but Ms. Richardson said she expected it would include many of the collection's most famous works, including Matisse's "Blue Nude" and "Pink Nude" and works by Cezanne, Gauguin and other leading modern artists.

Stephen HarveyAssociate film curatorBROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Stephen Harvey, associate curator of film the Museum of Modern Art, died of AIDS-related complications Friday at age 43.A film curator at the Museum of Modern Art since 1972, he had organized major retrospectives and programs on such film figures as Vincente Minnelli, Vittorio de Sica and Joseph Mankiewicz.His book, "Directed by Vincente Minnelli," published in 1990 by HarperCollins, is widely considered the definitive study of Minnelli and the MGM studio system of his time.

In the summer of 1994 a group of 32 to 35 late Matisse cutouts will come to the Baltimore Museum of Art for 2 1/2 months. The cutouts will come from the Pompidou Center in Paris in exchange for the loan of Matisse's famous 1907 painting "The Blue Nude" from the museum's Cone collection to a Matisse show at the Pompidou, BMA director Arnold L. Lehman said.Since the museum's Matisse collection does not include examples of the late, colored paper cutouts for which the artist is extremely well known, the show will complement the BMA's major Matisse holdings.

LITTLE BOOK OFFERS BIG HELP WITH LANGUAGES No hables espanol? With Universal Phrasebooks, es no problemo. The mini-pocket guides give quick access to essential phrases that English-speaking tourists need for survival: "Donde estan los servicios?" (Where are the restrooms?), "Cuanto cuesta?" (How much does it cost?) The books offer communication basics in organized sections: small talk, how to ask for directions, border etiquette and emergency information. Editions are available in Spanish, French, Italian and German, and have 2,500 translated words and more than 1,000 phrases, along with sample sentences that tell you how to string them all together.

Paul Cezanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter known as the father of modern art, was a proud, prickly and increasingly reclusive man whose genius went largely unrecognized for much of his life, only to be widely misunderstood when the world finally could no longer ignore it. His fame now is so great that it is almost impossible for us to view his art with fresh eyes - let alone through the eyes of his contemporaries of the late 1880s and 1890s....

Dr. Carl Gottschalk,75, a medical school professor and a leading researcher on kidney disease, died Wednesday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He used micropuncture techniques to better understand kidney function and disease.Dr. Edgar Haber,65, a cardiovascular researcher and Harvard Medical School professor, died Monday of multiple myeloma in Boston. He directed the division of biological sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he founded the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease.

It's commonplace that 90 percent of what's in museums lies mostly unseen, locked away in storage vaults that no one besides the odd staffer ever visits. Then every once in a while someone decides to pull these hidden treasures out, and suddenly we realize what we've been missing. Such is the case with the delightful little show of Japanese woodblock prints from the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which runs through May 12. These diminutive pictures of beautiful geisha girls, courtesans, Kabuki actresses and other inhabitants of what the Japanese called ukiyo-e, or "the floating world" of private pleasure and entertainment, are surely among the BMA's most charming holdings.

Sesame Street Live'Big Bird, Snuffy and all your favorite "Sesame Street Live" pals will be on stage at the Hersheypark Arena in Pennsylvania for seven performances today through Sunday. There will be plenty of singing and dancing as Zoe and Elmo welcome you into a friendship club that's filled with Muppets of all shapes, sizes and colors. The fun-loving story teaches children about helping others and shows them that everyone is different and special in his own way.Shows are at 7:30 p.m. today; 11:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. tomorrow; 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday; and 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Sunday.

NEW YORK - In name, appearance and address, MOMA QNS hardly looks like the city's newest major art museum. The ungainly acronym - it resembles a tough draw in Scrabble more than the title of a renowned art repository - stands for the Museum of Modern Art/Queens. But it represents a whole other world, a convergence of populism and elitism in a blue-collar borough famous for its airports (JFK, LaGuardia), baseball (Mets) and noisy, colorful characters (Archie Bunker, the Ramones). Indeed, where else but MOMA QNS can you ponder the Picasso milestone Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and, within moments, hit the check-cashing joint next door or grab a grilled cheese at the corner diner?

LOS ANGELES - Visitors who choose the audio guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new blockbuster exhibition, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, might recognize the voice that softly evokes the mysteries of Egypt as that of veteran actor Omar Sharif. The silver-haired actor is far from the first Hollywood star to read the narration for an audio guide at the museum, which, like many others, has turned to celebrities to add cachet to exhibitions. Edward James Olmos was the voice of its 1991 Mexican art exhibition, The Splendors of Thirty Centuries, and Peter Coyote spoke for Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, also in 1991.