Word: museumful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gradually emptied his own pictures of all but the barest, palest and sharpest images. As against his father's brocades, Andrew Wyeth's art has the austerity of smoky quartz crystals; yet it is all the richer for that, and the more valued. Last week the Philadelphia Museum of Art bought a typically bare new Wyeth for $35,000. Though not all museums disclose purchase prices, Philadelphia Museum officials believe theirs was the highest price ever paid by any U.S. museum for a living American's work...
...implied tribute was impressive. Though individual collectors have paid similar sums for Wyeth, a museum is in effect making a finding that its purchase has permanent value, must answer both to posterity and a board of trustees for the accuracy of its judgment...
...century ago a Belgian knight named Fritz Mayer van den Bergh began collecting art objects. He concentrated on Northern Renaissance examples, amassed some 1,000 pieces of high quality before his death in 1901. To hold the collection as a memorial, his mother founded the Mayer van den Bergh Museum. Tucked away in Antwerp's banking district and unchanged in 55 years, the museum is open every day except Monday in the summertime, and on even-numbered days all winter, charges only 5 francs (10?) admission. Yet the number of visitors annually is under 5,000. Art historians love...
Reigning spirit of the museum, as of the Northern Renaissance, is Pieter Brueghel the Elder, represented by two paintings: Mad Margaret and Flemish Proverbs. The first represents a giant housewife on what appears to be a militant invasion of hell. It has been widely reproduced. The second-Flemish Proverbs-may well be Brueghel's earliest extant painting, consists of twelve separate wooden "platters" framed as a unit. (One is reproduced life-size opposite, nine of the rest overleaf.) Pieter Brueghel the Younger framed the platters, but only the elder Brueghel could have done the actual painting. Only his hand...
...native to the lights of old Broadway, which provide heated dormitories for thousands of the birds every winter. And for the city-bound naturalist, nothing is more convenient than the hibernating habits of the big brown bat, who sleeps through the cold months in one wing of the Museum of Natural History. One of the joys of nature study, Kieran's book makes clear, is the fellowship of amateur and professional; most of the professionals in town roost, like the bats, at the museum...