Recommended Museums, Movies, Books etc.

The most important way you can enhance your understanding of art history is to visit as many museums and galleries as possible. Our proximity to New York City is a great advantage in this regard. Below is a selected list of museums in the area. Make a point of visiting as many museums as possible; visit their websites to familiarizeyourself with the collections. When you go, take pictures or buy postcards to share with the class!

Check out the Gallery Guide before you go - an online version is available at www.galleryguide.org.

Read the newspaper! Start with The New York Times on Friday and Sunday. Check out art magazines in the library.

MUSEUMS

New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org)
The Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org)
Guggenheim Museum (www.guggenheim.org)
Whitney Museum of American Art (www.whitney.org)
Jewish Museum (www.thejewishmuseum.org)
Museo del Barrio (www.elmuseo.org)
Museum for African Art (www.africanart.org)
Asia Society (www.asiasociety.org)
The New Museum of Contemporary Art (www.newmuseum.org)
The Cloisters (Medieval wing of the Metropolitan Museum) (http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_Of_Art/department.asp?dep=7)
National Museum of the American Indian, New York (www.nmai.si.edu)

Greenwich
Bruce Museum (www.brucemuseum.org)
Bendheim Gallery, run by the Greenwich Arts Council (www.greenwicharts.org)

Surrounding Areas
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (www.aldrichart.org)
Katonah Museum of Art (www.katonahmuseum.org)
Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase (www.neuberger.org)
Dia: Beacon, Beacon, New York (contemporary art museum) (www.diabeacon.org)
Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York (outdoor sculpture center) (www.stormking.org)
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (currently under renovation - selections on view) (www.artgallery.yale.edu)
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (ycba.yale.edu)

BOOKS
Fiction
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code
Chevalier, Tracy. Girl with A Pearl Earring (required summer reading 2005)
Chevalier, Tracy. The Lady and the Unicorn (about tapestry weavers in late Medieval Brussels)
Frayne, Michael. Headlong. (about a Breugel painting)
Maugham, Sommerset. The Moon and Sixpence (about a Gauguin-like artist)
Moggach, Deborah. Tulip Fever (17th Holland and its painters)
Stone, Irving. The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo, (Michelangelo’s troubles and triumphs)
Stone, Irving. Lust for Life (Van Gogh’s life)
Vreeland, Susan. The Passion of Artemisia (about the17th century Italian painter Artemesia Gentileschi)
Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue (the fate of a “Vermeer” painting over the centuries

Non-Fiction
Beck, James. Three Worlds of Michelangelo
Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe, The Life of an American Legend
Kimmelman, Michael. Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere
Lipson, Eunice. Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (about an art historian researching the life of the model of Manet’s Olympia)
Lisle, Laurie. Louise Nevelson, A Passionate Life (life of the French sculptor)
McCarthy, Mary. The Stones of Florence (focuses on the architecture)
Ratcliffe, Carter. The Fate of a Gesture, Jackson Pollock and Post-War American Art
Herrera, Hayden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo

FILMS
“The Agony and the Ecstasy” Charleton Heston as Michelangelo (1965)
“Camille Claudel” with Isabel Adjani as sculptor Camille Claudel and Gerard Depardieu as Auguste Rodin (1989)
“Frida” Selma Hayek plays Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (2003)
“Moulin Rouge” (the 1952 version starring Jose Ferrer and Zsa Zsa Gabor about Toulouse Lautrec - not the 2001 film with Nicole Kidman)
“Lust for Life” Kirk Douglas plays Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn plays Gauguin (1956)
“Pollock” Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock (2000)
“Wolf at the Door” Donald Sutherland plays Gauguin (1987)