By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Reading reviews of art exhibitions in distant metropolises can evoke envy for pleasures and excitements that are impossible to share because the locations are too far away. So a collection of exhibition reviews could seem frustrating rather than enticing, especially when the once-assembled pictures have returned to their homes. But it's excitement rather than frustration that seizes the reader of "Always Looking: Essays on Art" by the late John Updike because these reviews are so intelligent, well-informed and beautifully written.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum's new exhibition, "The Civil War and American Art," which opens today, has two stars. One is the enslaved black American; the other is Winslow Homer.
The studio where painter Winslow Homer derived inspiration on Maine's craggy coast and produced some of his most notable seascapes isn't heated by wood or illuminated by oil lamps the way it was in Homer's day.
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," Polonius advises son Laertes in "Hamlet." Good advice to sons, but not to museum directors.
Get ready to fall in love all over again _ with John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Frederic Edwin Church, Frederic Remington and other masters of American art.
After traveling to four venues over the past two years, the Corcoran Gallery of Art's masterpieces have returned in an expanded exhibition playing to their strengths. "The American Evolution" only runs through July but suggests a more permanent way of displaying these treasures within Ernest Flagg's beaux-arts building.
Defining its painterliness as the opposite of lineyness, he explains, "Thing and idea are merged in the synthesis of artistic representation."
The Homer studio, located on the Prouts Neck peninsula 12 miles south of Portland, is significant because it's where Homer's artwork matured and where he created some of his masterpieces, he said.
