Tag Archives: museums

“Desert Jewels” and “Anima and Tuareg” at the Museum of the African Diaspora

The Museum of the African Diaspora is hosting two small but excellent shows this month. “Desert Jewels: North African Jewelry and Photography from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermès Collection” features tribal jewelry and nineteenth-century photographs from an era when  advancements in photographic … Continue reading

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The Cult of Beauty: Victorian Avant-Garde at the Legion of Honor, for Art Practical

The temptation to sigh and swoon through The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900, at the Legion of Honor, is strong. The mostly male artists gathered here have borrowed the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s concept of “Art for art’s sake,” … Continue reading

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Francesca Woodman at SFMOMA, Huffington Post

There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman … Continue reading

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Masters of Venice at the De Young, Art Practical

Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power, composed of work on loan from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, provides a small but potent display of both the flights of inspiration and technical advancements that made fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice an … Continue reading

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I had problems with Asian Art Museum’s (and V&A’s) Maharaja show, SF Weekly

Any exhibition on the wealth of a nation’s royal class is an exhibition of the inflated amour-propre of men with money and armies at their beck. Well-fed bluebloods wrap themselves in theater curtains, pile on the baubles, and commission royal portraits for … Continue reading

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