Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first problem in describing Paul Mellon's role as patron is to draw comparisons. "Medicean" is the cliché for large acts of art patronage. This myth dies hard: started by the ruthless city-boss Lorenzo Il magnifico himself, prolonged by his sons, nourished by poets, flacks and hero-seeking historians from Poliziano to Jakob Burckhardt, it seems ineradicable, like kudzu. In fact, Lorenzo de Medici was not a remarkable art patron; he preferred jewelry, knickknacks, antiques and rare manuscripts to either painting or contemporary sculpture. The idea of disinterested art patronage in the service of some imagined "public...
Mellon did not return to English art in a systematic way until the late 1950s, and in fact no more than a fraction of the prodigious collection of the Yale center had been assembled before 1959. In that year Mellon met his chief aesthetic guide and mentor−his English Bernard Berenson, as it were−the late art historian Basil Taylor. Taylor, a great scholar of English art, possessed a sense of ethical delicacy almost inconceivable in the art world today (and certainly never shared by Berenson): he advised Mellon unofficially, for free, accepting only his expenses, lest...
...rest of the collection at Yale made more sense." The center's first director, Jules Prown, chose as architect Louis Kahn, whose strong-thewed volumes and subtle sense of the interplay of light and material had already produced the best new museum building in America−the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, opened in 1972. Kahn accepted the job and designed a four-story box, dedicated to light: a building without gimmicks or stylistic narcissism, low-keyed but explicit, whose pale concrete, blond wood and natural linen wall coverings provided a strictly subordinate background to the paintings...
...connoisseur, living well can also be a work of art...
...putting a figure on his other possessions: the 4,000-acre estate in Virginia, the retreats on Antigua and Cape Cod, the town houses in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., the stables of racing horses in the U.S. and Britain or the hundreds of English and French art masterpieces that he has yet to give away...