Etta and Claribel Cone, the Baltimore sisters whose Matisse collection is on view at the MIA for just a couple more weeks, weren’t exclusively Matisse fans, of course. Though that collection, some 500 of his paintings, drawings, illustrated books, and more, would have been enough to fill their shared apartments. They also had 17 paintings,  ...

Etta and Claribel Cone, the Baltimore sisters whose Matisse collection is on view at the MIA for just a couple more weeks, weren’t exclusively Matisse fans, of course. Though that collection, some 500 of his paintings, drawings, illustrated books, and more, would have been enough to fill their shared apartments. They also had 17 paintings,  ...

Art in Bloom, the MIA’s preeminent event for patrons, pairing fresh floral displays with art in the galleries, runs May 1 to 4. But there are thousands of floral-related artworks in the MIA collection, the great majority of which are not currently on view. So here’s a quick tour, an armchair Art in Bloom of  ...

On a recent afternoon, the staff in the MIA library set out several boxes of archival material and invited employees to peruse, an initial fact-finding foray in advance of next year’s 100th anniversary. And what could have been an allergy-inducing trip through mouldering grip-and-grin photos and self-congratulatory newspaper clips proved far more interesting for reasons  ...

Save for the occasional children’s book authors who can write as well as they draw—Maurice Sendak, Eric Carle—the disciplines are generally kept separate by a matter of competence. Yet artists have blended pictures and words, if not usually their own, since the very beginning of art. The current MIA exhibition Matisse: Masterworks from the Baltimore  ...

In the current MIA exhibition Matisse: Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art, running through May 18, there are quite a few examples of “odalisques,” semi-nude images of women reclining in exotic, vaguely North African garb. It was a popular genre in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, particularly among French painters. But what  ...

I never knew my great uncle Barton Kestle. He disappeared before I was born. He belongs, too, to a disappeared world of typewriters and teacups. In old family photographs he is captured in profile, always off to the side, distant, blurred, as though trying to escape the camera. On a Saturday night in March 1954,  ...

Last week, I recounted how a phone call launched a research project deep into the archives of the MIA, where I uncovered information about a 1948 exhibition of Berlin paintings saved by Monuments Men from the salt mines of Germany and Austria. Here’s part II: the story of how the paintings ended up in the  ...

On February 28, I received a voice mail from Ann Pflaum, the University of Minnesota historian. With all the recent talk of the Monuments Men and looted art during World War II, Ann recalled seeing an exhibition at the MIA of paintings rescued from the salt mines of Germany and Austria. Only it wasn’t a  ...

The audio guide to Matisse: Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art, the irresistibly colorful exhibition at the MIA, opens with an accordion in full musette mode (which may mean something only to accordion nerds like myself). It’s Paris in springtime (we can dream), the Montmartre cafes crowded with artists. You hear from the curator,  ...