Women Rips Picasso At New York Museum
Palestinian Women Called "Whores" By Jewish Youth At Holocaust Museum
Fundamentalist Town In Upstate New York
New York Helicopter-Plane Crash
Qatar's New Museum of Islamic Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) has one of the most incredible and engaging collections of paintings. Art is all subjective, of course. So that is my opinion. I have been to several world-class art museums - MET in New York, Louvre in Paris, Nation Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Prado in Madrid. And I think by far the MET is better.
The collection is very diverse (and the artifacts) and instead of being stocked with almost nothing but classical paintings, as many other museums are and which I find boring, the MET has an impressive collection of contemporary art which I think is often the best. And it all so has the Giovanni Paolo Panini collection of what I call 'Rome within Rome' (a duo presumable unless there are other paintings elsewhere), which is way better than the overrated Mona Lisa:
Modern Rome, 1757
Giovanni Paolo Panini (Italian, Roman, 1691–1765)
Oil on canvas
Ancient Rome, 1757
Giovanni Paolo Panini (Italian, Roman, 1691–1765)
Oil on canvas
Anyway, all this is by introduction to note this unfortunate news:
On Friday, a woman taking a class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art stumbled into “The Actor,” a work by Picasso dating to 1904 or 1905. The canvas was ripped in the lower right-hand corner.
The painting is valued at $130million:
It was an accident so the women will not be made to pay, and it will be repaired so all is good. But of all the museums and of all the paintings in the world she had to trip on this one!
I thought I would here share my own photos when I visited the MET over two or three days, I believe. It is worth more than one trip to truly appreciate it.
This painting is huge. It takes up a whole wall.
Same painter as the above, obviously.
Norman Rockwell's famous 'Freedom of Speech' painting - one of two.
I have a few others I could post - and some great paintings I could not photograph because of prohibition and some of these were the best - but I'll let your visit and discover them for yourself. Don't visit New York without the MET.
And, finally, I decree that the best painter whom ever lived be Edward Hooper. The Nation Gallery in Washington once brought nearly all his paintings - if not all - together for a special exhibit and I attended. I took many photos, thought I seem to have lost them unfortunately. But it doesn't matter, what matters is that I saw them. And I went primarily to see 'Nighthawk' - I decree that this be the best painting ever. And it is bigger than you expect and more incredible in person. I took numerous photos. 'Nighthawk's' home is the Chicago Museum of Art. Hooper is brilliant. I could say more about him and show more paintings, but you can do that yourself, I'll end it with the best:
