Walking through the galleries of eighteenth-century French art, we fell in love with The Love Letter, Jean Honoré Fragonard's feathery depiction of a flirtatious young lady. What first caught our eyes was the golden light that illuminates her pale skin and rosy cheeks. The beautiful light flows through the painting and brings out the yellow, brown, and pink tones of the work. The combination of colors is simply breathtaking.

Read More

​When we recently walked through gallery 642 in European Paintings, this painting in particular caught our eye. We found it so eye-catching because of its distinctive, dark color palette that makes it stand out from the rest of the gallery, and also because of its surreal and macabre subject matter.

Read More

The sculpture Pioneer Woman in the current exhibition The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925 caught my attention because it depicts a woman. Before you roll your eyes and claim that I am stating the obvious, bear with me! The field of American Western art is dominated by renditions of men and animals, so Bryant Baker's sculpture offers a unique approach to capturing the West. The very fact that Pioneer Woman focuses on a pioneer woman makes it noteworthy, but the meaning of the work is more elusive than just its subject matter.

Read More

Sculptures capture emotions and body movements, which, in my opinion, makes them more relatable than paintings. The sculptures in the exhibition The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925 really evoke the American West, and the details bring the pieces to life. Cast in different sizes and displayed on pedestals of different heights, the pieces create an effect like a mountain range. The ridges and valleys work to draw your attention to each piece, no matter its size, and the lack of conformity allows the viewer to allocate time to each sculpture and absorb its details.

Read More

The first object seen upon entering the exhibition The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925 is a buffalo, perhaps one of the most important symbols of the American West. This sculpture, Henry Merwin Shrady's Buffalo, stands in front of a blown-up chromolithograph of a herd of wild buffalo, and showcases the exhibition's unique point of view, blending the artists' and patrons' fondest memories and wildest dreams of what the vast, "untouched" frontier meant. Nostalgia and excitement abound in the exhibition, as brave pioneers conquer the West and search for the American Dream.

Read More

The exhibition Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China is all about ink. Darks and lights and midtones are used everywhere. There are so many different art styles that you're bound to find something you like. The exhibition features several scrolls, which tell stories through writing or pictures and even through combinations of the two.

Read More

Duan Jianyu's Beautiful Dream series in the exhibition Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China is surprisingly beautiful given the fact that it was painted on old corrugated cardboard boxes.

Read More

Before we encountered Xu Bing's Book from the Sky, we passed by Ai Weiwei's Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo—and almost missed it. The pot, located in the ancient Chinese galleries, looks ordinary except for its iconic logo. This was where we started to learn that the contemporary Chinese art scene is born from the synthesis and refutation of tradition.

Read More

In Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, we came across many pieces of artwork that exemplify the contrast between contemporary and traditional art. One of these pieces was Family Tree, a series of nine photographs in which the artist Zhang Huan's face gradually becomes covered in ink and traditional calligraphy.

Read More