Speed of Life

Rembrandt van Rijn Aristotle With The Bust of Homer 56 1/2" x 53 3/4" oil on canvas 1653 Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York   With the sad news that Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Walter Liedtke was killed in this week's horrible rail crash in New York, posting his powerfully narrated web episode of 82nd & 5th: "The Choice", for me, helps keep this wonderful man's passion for Rembrandt alive. Below is the  Metropolitan Museum of Art's label text for  Aristotle With The Bust of Homer : Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) rests his hand reflectively on a bust of Homer, the blind epic poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey. A medallion representing Alexander the Great, whom Aristotle tutored, hangs from the heavy gold chain. The philosopher contemplates material rewards as opposed to spiritual values, with the play of light and shadow on his features suggesting the motions of his mind. Painted for the great Sicilian collector Antonio Ruffo, t...

by Gregg Chadwick Holland  Cotter has a wonderful new piece in the New York Times entitled A Memory Museum .  Cotter writes,"  I’m also a curator of my memory, which carries traces of art encounters from over the years. A few of those encounters — with certain objects, books, buildings — have altered the atmosphere, changed how I see and joined a permanent collection that I regularly revisit." He then challenges us  to describe experiences with art that has changed our lives and to post them in the comment section in his article. I find this to be an enlightening question: Which works of art have changed the way you look at the world?  I answered Mr. Cotter with the following : The place of memory in the arts is so revealing. One of my first experiences with an artwork happened in Amsterdam when I was a six year old and the experience changed me forever. My father had finished his tour in Vietnam as a USMC JAG and we reunited as a family in Euro...

photo courtesy Christie’s Rembrandt Portrait of a Man, Half-Length, With His Arms Akimbo 421⁄4" x 341⁄4" oil on canvas 1658 Carol Vogel in the New York Times reports that the mystery buyer of Rembrandt's Portrait of a Man, Half-Length, With His Arms Akimbo at Christie's last week was casino mogul Stephen Wynn. The $33.2 million is a record for a Rembrandt at auction. The painting has an interesting recent provenance and after its donation by George Huntington Hartford II hung in the President's office at Columbia University in New York for ten years from 1958 to 1968. My hope is that Stephen Wynn will put the painting on public display in the near future. After closing his private gallery at the Wynn hotel, Las Vegas lost an intimate collection of important paintings. I enjoyed the Wynn collection immensely and as a non-gambler I was intrigued with the mix of great art within the glowing and at times tawdry Vegas of American pop culture. photo courtesy Reuters ...