Metropolitan Museum of Art

Occasions to see sculpture by the Italian Renaissance master, Michelangelo Buonarotti, are few and far between. From now through March 3 his unfnished Apollo-David is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Matisse: In Search of True Painting is a modest exhibition of just 49 works selected by Rebecca Rabinow, a curator of modern and contemporary art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It offers multiple views of specific themes and subjects. This provides valuable insights to the process and techniques of the artist. The Met show of Matisse is as satisfying as Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim is a bloody awful mess. In this clash of Titans, and faceoff of Holiday blockbusters, Matisse and the Met win hands down. No contest.

The stunning exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art "Bernini Sculpting in Clay" includes 29 of the artist’s bozetti, or sketch models in terracotta, standing between 12 and 20 inches tall — along with one or two larger and more finished models, which are as much as three feet tall. The project, which as been co organized with the Kimbell Museum, provides compelling insights to the artist's working process.

For the holidays two blockbuster exhibition provide the chance to compare and contrast the greatest masters of the School of Paris. The Metropolitam Museum is showing Henri Matisse while the Guggenheim features Picasso Black and White. A spin through the Guggenheim proved to be disappointing with a glut of mediocre mid period and late works and just a couple of bona fide masterpieces.

The October 2012 WFF went off without a hitch, well almost. BerkshireFineArts has already given overviews of this year's film festival. This report is primarily about short films, or Shorts, and their highly succesful screenings during a five day long movie feast!

Now in its 14th year the Williamstown Film Festival has been compressed from two weekends to one Wednesday through Sunday stretch. That saw an increase of guest artists and visitors who hung in for the duration of the unique cinematic event. Yet again, artistic director, Steve Lawson, concocted a heady mix of many short films and several stunning features. There was a sell out for the thursday opening night of Dreamscape, followed by a party at Mezze. On Friday Mass MoCA was packed for Knuckleball. This is the first of two reports and several interviews.

In the third and final installment of an in depth interview Stephen Hannock discusses how it takes a village to create his work. And that all of the individuals deserve to be respected and paid. He also articulate the process by which his remarkable lifestyle and the narrative of his images get woven into their creation.

The documentary film Dreamscapes by Wolfram Hissen will be screened on Thursday October 18 at the annual Williamstown Film Festival. Following the film, its subject the artist Stephen Hannock, and Top Chef producer and chief judge, Tom Colicchio, will engage in a dialogue with tasting at the restaurant Mezze. Hannock has been involved by creating paintings for a dozen new restaurant projects with Colicchio and his partner Danny Meyer. We met with Hannock in his Berkshire studio to discuss the film and his latest art projects.

Last night Compagnie Kafig blew the roof off of the Ted Shawn Theatre in their second visit to Jacob’s Pillow Dance since 2001. The French choreographer based in Lyon, Mourad Merzouki, has worked with eleven Brazilian dancers to create a compelling blend of indigenous dance and high cultures. The audience was thrilled and astonished.

From now through March, 2013 Mass MoCA will display the first major museum level survey of contemporary Canadian art in the United States. The work of sixty plus artists was selected through a process of some 400 studio visits over the past few years by curator Denise Markonish. It's a lively, upbeat, sprawling exhibition but don't expect any quick answers to the question of what is Canadian about Canadian art. Mostly it's like contemporary American art just less familiar and farther north,.

Between 1893 and 1895, Edvard Munch, 30 when he started the cycle, made four versions of "The Scream." It has proved to be one of the most iconic images of modern art. Three of the paintings are owned by museums in Norway. Two have been stolen and since recovered. The fourth, a pastel version from 1895, the last in private hands, set a new auction record this week at $120 million. That's a lot of cash for high anxiety.

None of the collections of Gertrude, Leo, Michael Stein and his wife Sarah remained intact. They sold and traded many masterpieces during their lifetimes. The collections were further dispersed by their heirs. In a definitive exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde 200 of these works have been brought together and are now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Beyond King Tut and Cleopatra most folks know little or nothing about the thirty dynasties and 3000 years of Ancient Egyptian Art. The Met's special exhibition The Dawn of Egyptian Art provides a tantalizing encounter with the esoteric era prior to and during the founding dynasties.

In 1952 a remarkable painting "Mountains and Sea" placed a recent Bennington College graduate, Helen Frankenthaler, in a position of innovator of what critic/ boyfriend, Clement Greenberg, dubbed Post-Painterly Abstraction. The movement is more widely known as Color Field Painting. We discussed her work in 1981 during an exhibition at the Rose Art Museum. At 83 she died on December 27.

At the beginning of WWII, the United States War Department was in a dilemma. They needed a more modular, lightweight way of splinting wounded personnel. They turned to the creative Venice Beach based designers, Charles and Ray Eames, to help solve the problem. The Eameses had been working on molding plywood for the previous few years. Having accessible the Navy's facilities, their design team was able to develop a molded plywood splint. Sculptural and elegant, it is now a design icon.

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown is fighting off a double Dutch dilemma (pun intended) with a miniscule but riveting special exhibition Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists. It is now off season in the Berkshires and the museum is 90% closed for renovation and construction through summer 2014. But it gamely remains open with free admission, terrific small exhibitions, and the enormously popular Met Live in HD broadcasts.

The Boston MFA has made a serious commttment to contemporary decorative arts. This has been a cumulative effort by Director Malcolm Rogers over the last decade and half. With the opening of the Linde Family Contemporary Art Wing in October, there was the opening of the first dedicated gallery to contemporary decorative art, the Farago Gallery. To curate this gallery and to integrate contemporary decorative arts, craft and design with the rest of contemporary visual art, the museum hired Emily Zilber as the first contemporary decorative arts curator. And this isn't all.

While the primary galleries of the Clark Art Museum will close in November for the final phase of a $145 expansion and renovation it will maintain programming on a limited basis. How that reflects on the norm of 200,000 annual visitors remains to be seen. Reducing the Clark in the mix will have a major impact on cultural tourism in the Northern Berkshires for the next few years. The construction, however, will create 500 temporary jobs with a $9 million economic impact.

During a drive around Newport, Rhode Island's famed Cliff Walk one encounters not just those fabulous cottages of the Gilded Age but also the armed fortress of the Patriaca clan. It is not a tourist attraction and drive by fast if you know what's good for you. With its craggy coast of nooks and crannies from early on it has been a smuggler's paradise and now a haven for mavens, Best known for fabulous jazz on a summer's day and lots of other cool stuff. We have a complete cheat sheet with contact info. Clip and save for a glorious getaway from the steamy city. The Vanderbilts traveled by yacht but you can get there with a car.

Concluding our attendance at the sixth annual Berkshire International Film Festival yesterday we attended three films: Part Time Fabulous, On the Ice, !Woman Art Revolution. While problematic for different reasons the films were consistent with the remarkable quality of the festival organized by founder and artistic director Kelley Vickery.

The works of contemporary European and African artists will take their place alongside French Impressionism in summer 2011 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. From June 12 through October 16, visitors will encounter the monumental sculptures of acclaimed artist El Anatsui in the Clark’s Stone Hill Center, and from June 12 through September 5, Spaces: Photographs by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth will be on view in the Clark’s original 1955 museum building.

The Hunter Center at Mass MoCA was packed for another of the ongoing collaborations with Jacob’s Pillow featuring the Cuban folkloric music and dance group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. If it takes a village a Northern Berkshires audience bonded with the traditions of rural Cuba that span centuries reaching back beyond slavery to origins in Africa.

For its size the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is regarded as one of the finest and best endowed regional museums. Now in another phase of expansion, the Clark is also endowing positions and selling a Renoir for $15 million. The sale of a "redundant' Renoir, as chief curator, Richard Rand describes it, will be use for yet to be determined acquisitions. In a depressed art market, it is an opportune time to have cash on hand.

The rituals of the Vienna Actionist, Hermann Nitsch, often entailed slaughtered animals, their blood and entrails, nude bodies and music which he composed. He is planning a major event in New York with the Mike Weiss Gallery.

In one of the most notable exhibitions of the season MoMA installed some 250 works, including a hundred paintings in Abstract Expressionist New York. The project was installed in the fourth floor galleries of its permanent collection. This is a fascinating but flawed overview of the New York School as seen through the narrow lens of generations of the museum's directors, trustees and curators. It has evoked a range of critical responses from praise to outrage.