The museum shop at the Minneapolis Institute of Art reopened two years ago as the Store at Mia. The selection is now more carefully curated, in keeping with the overall ethos of a museum, and isn’t limited to books, postcards, and other materials directly linked to exhibitions or the collection. Many of the items are handmade as  ...

To look for Lily Place is to peel back the bandages of a mummy. She was once, for a few incandescent years in the 1920s, seemingly everywhere—London, Paris, Cairo, New York, and Minneapolis. And always at the right time. She donated to Mia all the art and artifacts filling the corridor in the photo above from  ...

They were some of the greatest works of western civilization. Paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Botticelli, Titian, Manet, Velazquez. Monuments to human imagination. And they were in as much danger from Hitler’s mania as anything else in Europe. The Monuments Men, as George Clooney’s 2014 movie revealed, saved thousands of artworks stolen by the Nazis from  ...

She seems more apparition than woman, as though conjured in a séance. But she was very real: Miriam McHugh Taney. And for years she seemed to be the museum’s all-purpose lecturer—onstage, in the galleries, on WCCO Radio. In weekly talks at the museum, she tackled everything from medieval France to the Italian Renaissance. A professional  ...

Maybe it’s the woman’s mischievous look. Or something to do with clowns. But there’s a portent about this image—you sense the innocent child will somehow vanish behind the frame, as though passing through a portal. A trick of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination. The woman was facilitating make-believe—pretend you’re a painting!—with a stash of dress-up clothes at Mia’s 1981 Rose Fete.  ...

This painting, Destruction of the Beast and the False Prophet, has always drawn me in: the high drama, the fanaticism, the eeriness of the beasts. Painted by Benjamin West in 1804, it sits somewhere between neoclassical and Romanticism, a transitional piece. Classical/Biblical in subject matter and composition, but Romantic in its emotional and psychological content.  ...

Mia has hosted local art since the very beginning. A look back traces the ongoing dialogue in art circles of what, exactly, local art is. In 1920, about to open its sixth annual local art exhibition, the museum sought to downplay any regionalism, aspiring to something more universal: “The world is so bound together these days that there  ...

On October 18, Mia opens “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh,” a star-studded painting show with a historical sweep worthy of its protagonist. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir—they’ll all be here, along with the man they’re indebted to, Eugène Delacroix himself. Indeed, Delacroix has already arrived: In another of Mia’s birthday-year surprises, the French  ...

Look closely and you can see the name of Alfred Pillsbury under “lender.” It’s not hard: The cursive writing is clear as a carving, seemingly typed. As Mia’s registrars like to joke now, the primary job requirement for their predecessors long ago was good handwriting. And this person, probably a secretary in the director’s office,  ...

Kenzo Tange had resurrected Hiroshima, literally from the ashes. He designed a peace park in the city center and massive, modern buildings to house the thousands of bureaucrats who brought Japan back to life. An admirer of both Le Corbusier and traditional Japanese architecture, he built a bridge into the postwar period, and by the time he  ...