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      Brooklyn Museum at 200 Celebrates Beauty and Art’s Hidden History

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      At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it’s doing so in characteristic fashion — meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum.And it does so with two large-scale season-opening projects. One is a complete rehang and rethink of its American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from two hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The other, less radical, is a community-based roundup of new work by more than 200 contemporary artists living and working in the borough.Let me wedge in some history here. The museum was founded in 1823 as a circulating public library in what was then the Village of Brooklyn, across the river and independent from a rivalrous Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the library, called the Brooklyn Institute, began collecting, along with books, natural history specimens and art. (Among the first pieces acquired was a painting, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855), by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand. It’s in the American galleries rehang.)Asher B. Durand, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness,” 1855.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn 1898, what is now the museum moved into a version of its present McKim, Mead & White home where, over time, it scored some cultural coups. It was among the first United States museum to present African art as art rather than as ethnology. It organized a nervy survey of avant-garde European modernist art in 1926, three years before MoMA existed. The museum was also one of the first in the country to have an art school, and to create a conservation lab.As time went on it also courted controversy by giving space to art unwelcome elsewhere. In 1980, while two other museums backed out of a traveling tour of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn not only took it in but acquired the installation for its collection. (It’s on permanent view in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, another Brooklyn first.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When Monet and Turner Found Beauty in London’s Toxic Fog

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      Monet and Turner found something sublime in the polluted 19th-century city — and maybe something darker, too.If you’ve been to London recently (or ever) you’ll probably recognize Claude Monet’s description: “Today the weather was maddening, gusts of snow, then sunshine, fog and dark weather and clear, it was magnificent but all too changeable.”Yet the French painter found London’s moody climate an inspiration, and he purposely came in only the colder months. During three visits from 1899 to 1901, he produced dozens of canvases of the city’s surging River Thames, 36 of which were shown to acclaim in Paris in 1904 but never exhibited in London.One hundred and twenty years later, the Courtauld Gallery has brought a selection of the series home for the first time in “Monet and London: Views of the Thames” (through Jan. 19, 2025). The effect is as radiant and sublime as Monet might have hoped — though today we might see those unsettled skies in a different light.“Every day I find London more beautiful to paint,” he wrote to his wife Alice from the swish Savoy Hotel, where he stayed on those visits. From his riverside balcony, the artist could observe the working waterway, chugging with boat traffic and steaming with trains on bridges above, from sunrise to sunset. Here, he would fulfill his enduring wish to “try to paint some fog effects on the Thames.”Monet’s “Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames” (1903)Alain Basset/Lyon MbaAt the Courtauld (less than half a mile from the Savoy), 21 canvases show the river in an atmospheric suite of cornflower blue, cobalt, dove gray and mauve. The choppy Thames glimmers in shades of silver and blue flecked with violet and pink, or flaming yellow, orange and crimson from the sun — “the little red ball,” Monet called it — that’s high above in a sky thick with “delicious fog.” “The extraordinary fog so very yellow,” he wrote, characterized the industrialized late-19th-century London. Locals already called it “the Big Smoke.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Local’s Guide to Chiang Rai, Thailand

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      Four insiders on where to stay, eat “micro-seasonal” dishes and shop for handmade pottery and textiles.T’s monthly travel series, Flocking To, highlights places you might already have on your wish list, sharing tips from frequent visitors and locals alike. Sign up here to find us in your inbox once a month, along with our weekly roundup of cultural recommendations, monthly beauty guides and the latest stories from our print issues. Have a question? You can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.Travelers to the northern provinces of Thailand have long been drawn by two things — elephant camps and campy temples. The most famous examples of each are within or near the 13th-century city of Chiang Rai, where the Wat Rong Khun, or White Temple, stands as an artist’s parable of the world’s ills, as depicted in the form of pop culture villains and other icons of kitsch. (If crossing a sea of grasping arms at the entrance doesn’t terrify you, beware the Freddy Krueger-themed hanging planters.) Chiang Rai is also where the Emerald Buddha, a national treasure now housed in Bangkok’s Grand Palace, was reportedly discovered in 1434. According to legend, a bolt of lightning cracked the stupa in which it had been hidden years prior.Chiang Rai — the city shares its name with the surrounding province — has gained a reputation as something of a tourist trap, thanks to the tour buses that ferry visitors from the White Temple to the equally gaudy Blue Temple and then to the very bleak Black House (which the artist Thawan Duchanee, who died in 2014, decorated with elephant skulls and antlers and a table runner made of snakeskin). But the city, having played second fiddle to the luxe-boho paradise of Chiang Mai ever since King Mang Rai moved the capital of the Lanna Kingdom — which ruled over most of what is now northern Thailand — to the “new city” in 1296, has more recently emerged as an unhurried haven for serious artists and other creative professionals seeking to escape the heat and sprawl of Bangkok.The third edition of Thailand’s roaming Biennale, which brought dozens of international and Thai artists to Chiang Rai this past winter and spring, shed light on an often-overlooked aspect of the city — its long history as a cultural crossroads. Owing both to its proximity to Laos and Myanmar and, to some degree, the Golden Triangle’s uncomfortable past as a center of the global drug trade, Chiang Rai has been the site of intermingling cultures for centuries.“The constant migration of people of different races and religions make this an interesting place both geographically and culturally,” says the Chiang Rai-born artist and gallerist Angkrit Ajchariyasophon. In 2023, Chiang Rai was also recognized by UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network for its sustainable architecture design and landscapes. “My house is near the city’s oldest Christian church, close to an Islamic mosque and a Buddhist temple off the same road,” says Ajchariyasophon. “This is where I grew up and learned about cultural diversity, which I find wonderful.”Today, multigenerational family-run restaurants featuring traditional Thai, Chinese and Myanmarese specialties likewise share a slow-movement sensibility with hipster cafes that serve coffee from beans grown on local farms, and stylish home stays that incorporate teak wood scavenged from nearby forests. Here, Ajchariyasophon and other Chiang Rai enthusiasts offer their recommendations on where to stay, eat, shop and sightsee in and around the city.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Just Stop Oil Activists Sentenced for Attack on Van Gogh Painting

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      A judge sentenced two climate protesters to prison terms for throwing soup at the work in 2022, an act he called “criminally idiotic.”One morning in October 2022, Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer, two young climate activists, walked into room 43 of the National Gallery in London, opened two tins of Heinz tomato soup and then threw the sloppy orange contents at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.”The pair then glued themselves to the wall beneath the painting’s frame, before Plummer shouted, “What is worth more, art or life?”On Friday, a British judge sentenced the pair, both members of the Just Stop Oil protest group, to lengthy prison terms for the protest, which he said was “criminally idiotic” and could have caused “irreversible damage” to the masterpiece.Judge Christopher Hehir, sentenced Plummer, 23, to two years in prison for damaging the painting’s frame. Holland, 22, received 20 months in jail for the same offense. The court had found the pair guilty of the offenses in July.During the sentencing hearing, Judge Hehir said that acidic soup had a “corrosive effect” on the painting’s 17th-century wood frame and had lowered the frame’s value by an estimated 10,000 pounds, or about $13,000. The painting — one of a series that van Gogh made between 1888 and 1889 — is one of the National Gallery’s most treasured paintings and currently a centerpiece of the museum’s 200th anniversary exhibition, “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.”The judge said the duo’s action came close to damaging the masterpiece — within “the thickness of a pane of glass.” He added that “stupidity like this” could lead museums to withdraw cultural treasures from public view, or force them to introduce onerous security measures that would deter visitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Bead Artist Liza Lou ‘Messes With Your Mind’

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      A gun, a bottle of Jack Daniels, a splatter, a million beads. With these details, the California artist Liza Lou tells you stories. And just a minuscule bead, she explains, is like an underlined word: it can focus your attention, and slow you down.“Beads highlight what is ordinary and make you look at it,” said Lou, known for her life-size beaded sculptural installations, including “Kitchen” (1991-96), in the collection of the Whitney Museum, and “Back Yard,” acquired in 2002 by the Fondation Cartier. She was speaking recently in front of “Trailer,” another massive construction, originally made 25 years ago and filled with tens of millions of Czech glass beads. It just arrived at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.Lou, 55, has reached a turning point in her career, as she transitions from the objects that put her on the map — the Museum of Modern Art recently acquired a beaded teacup and saucer — into more abstract work, all created with her favorite material, which she called “tiny messengers of pigment, dot size expressions of joy.”Carmen Hermo, a curator who worked on the “Trailer” installation, said, “There is a tenderness to the attention that Liza pays” to every detail and bead placement. The meticulousness of works like “Trailer,” she added, “just kind of messes with your mind. There’s something so everyday but also very uncanny about it.”The artist inside “Trailer” when it was first exhibited at Deitch Projects, New York, in 2002. Furnishings are covered with beads, from walls and floors to a typewriter and bottle of Jack Daniels. Mick HaggertyThe artist’s beaded “Trailer” at the Brooklyn Museum, in which Lou asks whose labor is valued, and how. It rewards close observation, from its décor to its smokes and weapons.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Getty Apologizes for Fireworks Display Gone Awry

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      A planned “explosion event” in Los Angeles by the artist Cai Guo-Qiang left several injured and others shaken.The Getty museum this week found itself having to apologize for the “explosion event” by the artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum after it left several people injured by falling debris and many others shaken by the sound and smoke.“We’re aware of a few people who were hit by some kind of falling debris, and it was really loud, and we’re really sorry there were people who were freaked out by how loud and smoky it was,” Katherine E. Fleming, the president of the Getty Trust, said in a telephone interview, adding that appropriate procedures had been followed for stadium events and that city officials had been notified in advance.The fireworks display on Sept. 15 — which the Getty had said in an earlier news release would “recall the myth of Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods” — marked the start of PST Art, a $20 million, Getty-funded museum collaboration which this year is focused on art and science.The Getty did not specify how many people were injured or to what extent. “Unfortunately, pieces of debris fell on some people. We know a few of them required first aid,” a spokeswoman told The Art Newspaper in an email. “Of course this is distressing to us, and we have expressed our concern to the people for whom we have contact information.”Calls to the Los Angeles Fire Department and police were not immediately returned.Some people in the area were also highly disturbed by the loud noise. “It sounded like bombs dropping in the neighborhood,” one resident told CNN.Carol Cheh, a Los Angeles arts writer, added that in the “times that we live in” it was understandable that people were rattled. “Here we are setting off massive explosions with a ton of smoke and no explanation in a major city,” she said.For Cai’s show, “WE ARE,” more than 4,000 people on the stadium’s playing field watched fireworks shells on bamboo sticks explode with drone-launched pyrotechnics overhead, a type of fireworks that began to be approved this year. Cai narrated the event from a podium on the sidelines with an A.I.-assisted translator.Cai, who designed the pyrotechnics for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, had worked on the Los Angeles display with an artificial intelligence program developed by his studio. “I’m thinking about a celebration of the hopes and successes of the human civilization,” he told The Times in July, “and I’m having A.I. play a role as my collaborator to help tell the story.” More

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      Art Institute of Chicago Receives $75 Million Gift

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      The donation from Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed will support the museum’s new galleries.The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday announced a gift of $75 million that will support new galleries for its collection of late-19th-century, modern and contemporary art.The new building will bear the names of Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed, the married couple whose donation is the largest individual naming gift in the museum’s history.“This converts what has been an aspiration into a reality,” said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute.“It is just about access to collections,” he continued. “Only about 16 percent of our modern and contemporary collection is on view.”The museum has yet to announce the total cost of the building project, the square footage or a completion date, Rondeau said. While the addition will increase the Art Institute’s $115 million annual operating budget, Rondeau said the museum had prepared for that by building its endowment by $200 million over the past five years.The new galleries are part of a project that began in 2019 to enhance existing spaces and explore how to make the most of the museum’s campus. The Art Institute is working with the architecture firm Barozzi Veiga.Fleischman, formerly a prominent lawyer in Washington, began collecting in the mid-1980s and has been a trustee of the Art Institute for nearly 15 years. Lougheed received a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and he has specialized in international education.“Touring the collections on view and in storage I came to believe that more of the museum’s extraordinary collection needed to be available to visitors and presented in world-class architecture,” Fleischman said in a statement, adding that he was excited “for the museum to tell a more complete story of modern and contemporary art.” More

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      The Hidden Splendors of Cleveland’s Museums

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      It’s not too late to enjoy some lake weather in Cleveland, where the ice cream is fabulous and there’s never any shortage of art to see — let our critic tell you where.In the depths of summer, while other art lovers in New York are catching the B train to Brighton Beach or busy with parties in the Hamptons, I like to enjoy a week or two of lake weather in Cleveland, where my in-laws live, where the ice cream is fabulous — and where there’s no shortage of art to see. In years past I’ve visited Praxis Fiber Workshop and the Sculpture Center — both of which make ingenious use of the huge spaces that a postindustrial city can offer — as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. But these are the places that caught me this time.Cleveland Museum of ArtImagine the Metropolitan Museum with free admission and not more than a comfortable sprinkling of other visitors, and you’ll get a sense of the CMA. With an encyclopedic collection of more than 65,000 objects housed in a snazzy neo-Classical palace, it’s always a great place to pass a few leisurely hours. But the Cleveland Museum of Art also hosts a constant stream of excellent temporary exhibitions. Just at the moment, they’ve got shows on Korean couture and the history of Korea’s so-called Seven Jeweled Mountain; an installation by Rose B. Simpson; and a fascinating show of photos from East Los Angeles and the U.S.-Mexico border.“Raven’s Head in Profile,” 1875, by Édouard Manet, an illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”The Cleveland Museum of Art, Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund 1923.215The real knockout, though, is “Fairy Tales and Fables: Illustration and Storytelling in Art.” In just two modest rooms and a hallway, it covers a thrilling range of artistic styles and tones, with prints and drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Marc Chagall and dozens of others. Picasso’s exhilarating illustrations of “Lysistrata,” the mind-bending details of Eugen Napoleon Neureuther’s Sleeping Beauty prints, and Édouard Manet’s inky, self-conscious raven, made for Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, could all anchor exhibitions in their own right. But I was most struck by four wood engravings that Clare Leighton made to illustrate Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” I’ve never seen such depth and density wrung out of black and white, such virtuosic delicacy of engraving.Museum of American Porcelain Art“The Bride,” a porcelain sculpture based on a 1937 oil painting by Boleslaw Cybis, is one of an edition of 100 issued by Cybis Studio between 1980 and 1982.Carey Barone/ Museum of American Porcelain ArtA few years ago, Richard A. Barone, a retired asset manager, found himself reminiscing about the porcelain collectibles he’d once dabbled in trading, pieces made in a complex, uniquely American process in five factories in New Jersey. Shocked to discover that the factories were all closed or closing, and that there was no museum dedicated to American porcelain, he became a serious collector — buying up the remnants and archives of Edward Marshall Boehm Studio and the Cybis Studio in Trenton, along with hundreds of pieces — and opened his own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More