SAAM Stories

Getting tired of mobs of tourists wherever you travel this summer? Paul Cadmus could relate. He created Bar Italia to satirize the tourist crowds in Italy, where he lived and worked in the early 1950s.

The "Week Ahead" column in the Sunday, August 13, New York Times notes a Joseph Cornell exhibiton at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York. Holland Cotter's brief description imparts some of the magic and wonder of Cornell's work.

A friend who works in the Senate offered to meet me in the Hart Building before heading over to show me around some special collections rooms at the Library of Congress.

George Catlin (about whom Eye Level has written before) composed naturalist paintings on the trail that necessarily required a quick touch.

The prince and president, surrounded by various dignitaries, may be the focus of this group portrait, but it's the image of George Washington that makes this painting especially interesting. His profile is outlined in the clouds (hint: look in the middle of painting, between the two groups of trees), as if implying the first president's presence at the joint British/American visit to his tomb.

For a behind-the-scenes look at museum blogging in general and Eye Level in particular, take a look at Now on exhibit, the blogger's view in Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

Gene Davis's Two Part Blue was given to American Art in the ‘90s as part of the late artist’s estate. The painting came with a surprise: it seemed to have some white accretions on its surface.

From the NYT write-up of the new design for the Parrish Art Museum in Long Island:

SAAM lighting designer, Scott Rosenfeld, gives us an inside look at the challenge of lighting artwork. Lighting the Color Field Gallery (3rd floor, West Wing), according to Scott, was an exciting endeavor:

With our opening festivities complete we're turning our attentions upward —to the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard being designed by renowned British architect Norman Foster and scheduled for completion by the fall of next year.

I spoke to conservator Ann Creager, who explained that she was removing the last patch of a layer of old varnish from the this portrait (circa 1850), Woman with Gold Necklace.

Peer closely at Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada, California—you need to be standing up close and personal, because you won't find it even in a large image—and you will see, in the lower left-hand corner of the painting, hovering in a stream under the shadow of a rock outcrop, a trout.

Rachel Allen, our Deputy Director, reminded us today of another milestone: "999 days ago, the museum started counting the days until reopening.

From Eye Level's command center here in the recesses of the Luce Foundation Center yesterday, we were amazed at the surge of energy and people in our halls.

There were 18,744 visitors to the Donald W. Reynolds Center yesterday on its opening day.

Visitors to The National Portrait Gallery can see Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

Offset from the modern/contemporary Lincoln Gallery is a dark room (the kind of museum space in which you might watch a video piece) where David Hockney's 1995–96 Snails Space With Vari-Lites, "Painting as Performance" is installed.

A crowd of hundreds waited outside, everyone hoping to be the first to enter. Waving fans and folded papers, people were surely eager to escape the heat from today's bright sunshine. There was goofy entertainment aplenty; actors dressed as George and Martha Washington and Uncle Sam chatted up the crowd, and two people dressed as the iconic father and daughter from Grant Wood's American Gothic waved down from a portico.