Museum of Fine Arts

Natalie Dessay has been one of the most electrifying singer/actresses on the opera stage for nearly 30 years. Now, she is focusing her career on pop songs and the classic song literature. Dessay assembled a primarily French program with enough German songs to give the evening some weight.

Several months ago we spoke in depth with Joe Thompson about a bill pending on Beacon Hill to grant $25 million toward the final phase of developing the North Adams campus of Mass MoCA. This week, early August, 2014 the bill has been signed by outgoing Governor Deval Patrick a Berkshire neighbor of the museum. Thompson, as he discusses here, must raise an additional $30 million for the project which will take several years.

David Bonetti started a career as an art critic writing for the Boston Phoenix and Art New England. He moved on to write for daily papers in San Francisco and St. Louis. Now retired from covering fine arts he has returned to Boston. For the past few years he has covered opera for Berkshire Fine Arts with the occasional art piece. In response to our coverage of the retirement of MFA director, Malcolm Rogers, in a letter to the editor he offered a different take. We post it as an op ed piece.

The MFA today has been totally rebuilt and defined by Malcolm Rogers. He is resigning after 19 years of dramatic and event brutal change. Part of that transformation is a not so benign neglect of more than a century of institutional and cultural history. The story of the resignation of Rogers was written under pressure of deadline. Since then further research has clarified points raised in the article. More will follow.

By just two years over Perry T. Rathbone, at 19, the British born Malcolm Rogers is leaving the Museum of Fine Arts as its longest running, most successful and controversial director. From top to bottom he reformed, renovated and rebuilt ever aspect of the museum. Along the way playing a hardball game of croquet worthy of the Queen of Hearts.

Looking Berkshire hipster and artist Arthur Yanoff in the eye the rabbi told him "Once a Lubavitcher always a Lubavitcher." In part two we move from Coffee Corner to crits with Clement Greenberg and raising dogs in the country. Along the way Yanoff was celebrated as Jewish Artist of the Year. For which he had to rent a tux in Great Borington. Or something like that in no particular order.

Arthur Yanoff has had a one man show at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and was named Jewish Artist of the Year. A couple of years ago he and photographer Kay Canavino collaborated on a Melville project for the Ralph Brill Gallery and the author's former home Arrowhead in Pittsfield. We met recently to discuss Boston's Coffee Corner and its rarely documented hipster legacy which was a spawning ground for gonzo.

Inspired by recent visits to neolithic sites in Ireland, and memories of Stonehenge some years ago, we reconnected with the artist Jane Hudson about an exhibition we worked on together. The project Stones in the gallery of the New England School of Art & Design was stunning and deeply complex. This is a dialogue about that work and the ancient sites which inspired the exhibition.

During the 1979 traveling exhibition Treasures of Early Irish Art I first viewed the Book of Kells. Given the long line of visitors it proved to be a brief encounter. That also was the case during a recent visit to the Old Library of Trinty College in Dublin. It was an absorbing and enchanting experience of the essence of Irish heritage.

The traveling exhibition "John Singer Sargent Watercolors" encourages us to view the artist as more than a glib and succesful society portrait painterr of the Gilded Age. This is an intimate study of the private Sargent painting in nature entirely for his own pleasure. It is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity to see this aspect of his work in stunning depth and range,.

Lizbeth Krupp, a leading patron of the arts and collector will serve a three-year term as volunteer leader of the Rose Art Mueum, home to one of New England's principal collections of modern and contemporary art.

Regular visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts were readily familiar with many of the works in the 2006 traveling exhibition Americans in Paris 1860-1900. Its renowned permanent collection was augmented with loans of masterpieces including Whistler's Mother and Madame X by Sargent. This review is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

After work at New England School or Art & Design we slipped into a booth for a beer and burger with colleague Sophia Ainslie. The South African born artist discussed installations involving bales of recycled materials. We later arranged to have them become a part of an exhibition I co curated in 2004 with Arthur Birkland. This reported is reposted from 2005 in Maverick Arts Magazine.

Some five years previously, Robert Wilson explained, he had been approached by the mayor of Oberammergau, a community of 5,000 that has been presenting a Passion Play, every ten years, since 1634. The resultant 14 Stations were reinstalled at Mass MoCA in 2001 where they remained on view for a year. This report is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

As research for the exhibition Native New Yorkers we interviewed artists, a curator and collector. We found that questions led every deeper into a richly diverse and little understood field of contemporary art. The article is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

The 2005 DeCordova Annual Exhibition included: Jean Blackburn, Lalla A. Essaydi, Milan Klic, Michael Lewy, Sally Moore, Laurie Sloan, Barbara Takenaga, Nao Tomii, Nadya Volicer, Mark Wethli. Reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

In 2003 the Museum of Fine Arts unveiled a major acquisition of European and American figurative/ realism paintings ans sculptures A Singular Vision: The Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Legacy. This report is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

During a 2005 drive through the South West we connected with former Boston artist and musician Paul Shapiro in Santa Fe. He played guitar in the 1960s Boston rock band the Hallucinations which featured lead singer Peter Wolf. In the studio he was working on a new direction from his best selling abstracted desert landscapes. This piece is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

Thaddeus "Thad" Beal is included in the Chawky Frenn book 100 Boston Artists. Actually I have long regarded him as one of the top ten Boston painters. It was a privilege to curate an exhibition of his work at the Gallery of the New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University. In 2006 we met for a Beer and Burger as reported in Maverick Arts Magazine.

As a young artist in New York James Rosenquist supported himself by painting billboards. That informed his approach as a Pop artist. For a time in the 1960s I worked for him as a studio assistant. This review of the Guggenheim retrospective is reposted from a 2004 article in Maverick Arts Magazine.

Blinky Palermo a name adapted by a German artist from the genre of American boxing was a student of Joseph Beuys. But, in a brief career, he went in a different direction. In the relatively small Serpentine Gallery in London we had the rare opportunity to see his work in depth. This report was posted to Maverick Arts Magazine on May 29, 2003.

Painting in Boston: 1950-2000 was presented at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park . This review is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

In 2001 the Museum of Fine Arts paid tribute to women in "A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940." This review is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

Provincetown is renowned for the tradition of a single woodblock so called White Line prints. We repost a review of the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition From Paris to Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut that appeared in Maverick Arts Magazine.

Meg White runs the day to day operation of the formidable Gallery Naga on Newbury Street. Founded as a cooperative gallery in 975 that changed when Arthur Dion took over in 1982. He pursued a mandate to represent Boston artists. A close working relationship and ready access to their studios was essential to his approach to representation. In 2005 we met to discuss his take on the Boston art world.