Let’s assume this was staged. The flood lighting, the dramatic expression—it’s as though the girl had seen a ghost, not a Picasso. The Minneapolis Times-Tribune photographer shooting Harriet Johnson and Donald Knox at the MIA in 1941 had probably asked for a reaction, and got one. But even museums struggled with modern art. “Whether we  ...

When the MIA opened, in 1915, James J. Hill used his time at the podium to admonish the museum not to “pitch the key too low”—to keep a high aesthetic standard. Arguably it has. And recently that bar has extended to the redesigned Store at MIA, reflecting the virtuosity in the galleries with some of  ...

I cried during my first visit to Vienna, in 1988. It happened in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where there are many moving and impactful paintings by artists such as Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, and Caravaggio. It was the Breughel gallery that caused me to weep. It’s a large room, empty save for the walls, which  ...

I cried during my first visit to Vienna, in 1988. It happened in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where there are many moving and impactful paintings by artists such as Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, and Caravaggio. It was the Breughel gallery that caused me to weep. It’s a large room, empty save for the walls, which  ...

It’s now one of the MIA’s most beloved artworks: Jade Mountain Illustrating the Gathering of Scholars at the Lanting Pavilion, carved in 1784. But a hundred years ago the 640-pound sculpture was used as a table centerpiece. You could do this if you were T.B. Walker, this was your table, and you owned the jade mountain. Bon  ...

Mercedes Knapp arrives at the MIA with a serving tray bearing a miniature menagerie. Some of the creatures are identifiable: koi fish, a lion, a sleeping deer. Others are more nebulous, with the rounded, fantastical features of anime. She calls them Puds, colorful little blobs that resemble nothing so much as gumdrops. She’s been making the cuddly creatures  ...

Mercedes Knapp arrives at the MIA with a serving tray bearing a miniature menagerie. Some of the creatures are identifiable: koi fish, a lion, a sleeping deer. Others are more nebulous, with the rounded, fantastical features of anime. She calls them Puds, colorful little blobs that resemble nothing so much as gumdrops. She’s been making the cuddly creatures  ...

Somewhere in these renderings, surely, is a pod chair with speakers piping atonal music. This is how architect Kenzo Tange’s 1974 minimalist addition to the MIA was expected to play out: the museum as mod social hub. Tange was a starchitect before anyone had thought of the term. He blended Le Corbusier’s modernism with traditional  ...

Somewhere in these renderings, surely, is a pod chair with speakers piping atonal music. This is how architect Kenzo Tange’s 1974 minimalist addition to the MIA was expected to play out: the museum as mod social hub. Tange was a starchitect before anyone had thought of the term. He blended Le Corbusier’s modernism with traditional  ...

Anyone entering Phil Barber’s studio in the belly of the MIA recently might think they had stumbled upon a Habsburgian Montessori class. On the floor were 190 pieces of paper that Barber had cut from the pages of a battered, leather-bound portfolio. Somehow the shapes would fit together to become the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian  ...