From the Met’s press release:

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 12 October 2009 – 24 January 2010

Ralph Earl, "Elijah Boardman," 1789 (NY: Met)

From the decade before the Revolution to the eve of World War I, many of America’s most acclaimed painters captured in their finest works the temperament of their respective eras. They recorded and defined the emerging character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 brings together for the first time more than 100 of these iconic pictures that tell compelling stories of life’s tasks and pleasures. The first overview of the subject in more than 35 years, the exhibition includes loans from leading museums and private lenders—and many paintings from the Metropolitan’s own distinguished collection. American Stories features masterpieces by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows, and notable works by some of their key colleagues.

The exhibition examines stories based on familiar experience and the means by which painters told their stories through their choices of settings, players, action, and various narrative devices. The artists’ responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations are examined, as are their evolving styles and standards of storytelling in relation to the themes of childhood, marriage, the family, and the community; the production and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes towards race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of art making.

The exhibition is arranged in four chronological sections. The first—Inventing American Stories, 1765–1830—begins with artists who told stories through portraits. Serving their sitters’ self-conscious interest in how they appeared in the eyes of others, American portraitists often emulated British compositions. Although these artists focused on individuals and particular locales and relationships, the cleverest of them responded to broader narrative agendas and to the natural impulse to tell stories. In his portrait of his colleague Paul Revere (1768, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), John Singleton Copley embedded subtle narrative into a traditional single-figure format, with the silversmith’s gestures and gaze conveying volumes about the time in which he lived. As their patrons learned to read portraits for more than likeness and to appreciate artistic license, portraitists began to gratify their sitters by telling subtle personal stories in increasingly elaborate compositions. In his ingenious double-likeness of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (1788, National Gallery of Art, Washington), for instance, Charles Willson Peale implied the sexual bond that defined the Lamings’ marriage. Later in this period, some painters told grand stories in pictures produced for public exhibition, rather than purely for private enjoyment. In Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago), Samuel F. B. Morse proposed that his compatriots must achieve cultural independence from Europe even while they learned from the Old World’s greatest artistic achievements.

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In addition to the materials contained at the Met’s website, there is an exhibition blog that’s updated regularly. The November 2009 issue of The Magazine Antiques includes an instructive article by Carrie Barratt and H. Barbara Weinberg, “American Artists as They Saw Themselves.”

Although this show is more than two years old (oops, must have missed it), I am intrigued by Stella’s career: starting from very “flat” paintings, to large colorful wall sculpture (see second video), and now these large architectural pieces.

James Kalm bikes uptown to view Frank Stella “On the Roof” and Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, at the Metropolitan Museum. With a career spanning nearly fifty years in the New York art scene, Frank Stella is finally honored with a double show of recent and historic examples of his work at the Metropolitan Museum. An exclusive interview with the artist is featured and a cameo appearance by Walter Robinson.

‘Art of the Samurai’ has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum. In the wake of controversy, protests, and rather scathing (anti-)Orientalist accusations leveled against the San Francisco museum for their Lords of the Samurai exhibition barely a month ago, one might think the Met would have rethought their exhibition schedule. But, of course, these things are planned out way in advance, and one month ahead of time is far too short notice to cancel or change things, except in the most extreme of situations.

In any case, I’m sure it’s an excellent exhibition, and I regret that I won’t be able to be home in New York to see it.

The New York Times’ review can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/arts/design/23samurai.html

It also includes some great photos, providing a glimpse at the kinds of things, including a number of National Treasures, on display: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/10/22/arts/20091023-SAMU_index.html

Forum Provides Opportunity For Western, Chinese Collectors, Curators And Artists Come Together To Discuss Future Of Art Collecting In China

Western and Chinese experts discussed a wide range of important issues in art collecting at the Global Collecting Forum in Beijing (Photo: CRI)

Although the last few years have seen the rapid rise of the New Chinese Collector of contemporary Chinese art, the relatively late arrival of Chinese collectors means that the vast majority of major works of contemporary Chinese art remain in the collections of Western art collectors (such as the former Swiss diplomat-turned-prolific collector Uli Sigg, who owns around 2,000 pieces) or Western art museums and galleries. Although buying trends are changing, as more Chinese collectors and curators start to bolster their collections and diversify the artwork they acquire, one of the unique challenges that art lovers in China must face is the dearth of contemporary Chinese artwork available for view in their local museums and galleries.

With these issues — the underdevelopment of Chinese art museums and the growing interest in private art collection in China — in mind, this weekend the Global Collecting Forum was held at Beijing’s Reignwood Theater. The forum brought together a number of prominent Western and Chinese art collectors, museum curators, gallery owners and artists, whose work was shown at an exhibition which included pieces by prominent Chinese artists like Cai Guoqiang, Xu Bing, Liu Xiaodong and Wang Guangyi. According to Cultural China:

[Chinese writer-filmmaker Sun Shuyun], who was a guest at last year’s ISD forum, has met some of the world’s best-known art collectors and museum directors there. But she was somehow left with the impression that many of these “leaders of art collecting actually knew very little about Chinese art.”

The situation is expected to improve as this year’s forum brings over 30 leading art experts from Europe, the United States and Russia to meet with their Asian counterparts in the Chinese capital. Those set to show up include Baroness Kennedy QC, a trustee of the British Museum; Alexandra Monroe, senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum; and Derek Gillman, director of the US-based Barnes Foundation, a top collector of Post-Impressionist paintings.

After the activity of recent weeks, when more events such as this were held during China’s celebratory “Golden Week” and during the Songzhuang Art Festival (where China’s first-ever conference of collectors of Chinese contemporary art took place), it is clear that new Chinese collectors (and curators) are motivated to gain more artistic literacy while also learning techniques for boosting public awareness and interest in Chinese contemporary art. From an analysis of the Global Collecting Forum on China.org:

“Major museums in China are still focused largely on modern art as opposed to contemporary… and their collections rely largely on donations from artists or their relations,” [Wang Huangsheng, director of the Art Museum of China Central Academy of Fine Arts] said recently at the Global Collecting Forum, which for the first time gathered the world’s top institutional and private collectors in Beijing. According to Wang, although some museums have agendas for contemporary art, a small budget and an incomplete art preservation system are two major obstacles for Chinese museums in acquiring contemporary art. Wang calls on Chinese art museums to expand their financial resources, and make long-term and systematic collecting agendas.

…

Experts at the forum believe it’s the responsibility of art museums and institutions to help the general public understand contemporary art, and by cultivating a wider social interest, motivate the public to become collectors.

Uli Sigg, the Swiss collector of Chinese contemporary art, has said he will probably bring his collection back to China eventually (“In the end, it would make sense for the Chinese people to see their own art.”). Hopefully by then, Chinese museums and private collectors will be ready to include those artworks in their permanent collections.

Working under the shadows, originally uploaded by CVerwaal.

The shadows in the Robert Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum can be very dramatic and in this case formed an interesting backdrop for this guard working at a desk. Taken with the Canon G9. Converted from RAW to BW with a photoshop plug-in.

The 1 train must not have been feeling well today. I got on the uptown local at Lincoln Center, intending to take it up to 86th street and then catch the crosstown bus to a night at the Met Museum. But no sooner had I wedged myself and my violin case, sardine-like, amongst the unusually large number of unusually irritable commuters than I heard a crackly voice over the speakers: “This is an uptown 1 train headed for the Bronx…*indecipherable static*…next stop today will be 103 Street.”

Holy crap! I barely leaped off the train before it pulled away from the station. Just as I thought I was getting used to New York’s many manifold transit mysteries. Like why the M86 sometimes feels compelled to go across the park at 97th street, for example. Now I had to deal with inexplicable train schizophrenia.
Well, it could have been much worse, I figured as I climbed the stairs back out of the station and into the fading sunlight. It was a spectacular day, perfect October. The sky was clear, the air pure and crisp, reborn after summer’s humid sogginess, and filled with dancing leaves. The sun was beginning to set, turning the western sky that cool pale purple only seen in autumn…it was all a bit Rachmaninovesque, I decided: romantic, nostalgic and a bit melancholy, but always exquisitely beautiful in the kind of way that makes you glad to be alive.
And then I walked past Alice Tully Hall, which sported a large sign for the New York Film Festival and a long line of people queuing up for last-minute tickets. (I saw Andrzej Wajda’s latest masterpiece there last weekend and am still thinking about it, but that’s another blog.) And then I heard some angry shouts, turned around and saw a nasty little handful of sign-waving protesters clamoring for Roman Polanski’s head on a platter.

YUCK. Mood officially ruined. Muttering irritably, I stormed away from Lincoln Center at race-walker pace, the perfect Rachmaninov moment disintegrating into an ugly atonal mess.
That whole sordid case has a special ability of putting me in a rotten state of mind every time it’s mentioned anyways, but this appearance particularly struck me. It only took a few seconds of reflection to remember that there is not a single Polanski film playing at this year’s Festival. What on Earth, then, were those protesters doing out there?
I should clarify that I could hardly care less about what happens to Polanski the man, who, all sources seem to agree, is a slimeball. What I care about is the legacy of Polanski the director, Polanski the artist, and most of all for the future of Polanski’s films. Already I hear people boasting that they never watch a movie if they know Polanski directed it, oozing moral superiority from every smirking pore. So is Polanski the next Wagner? Over a hundred years after Wagner’s death and one is still expected to go through a contorted ritual of contrition, breast-beating and self-questioning both before and after going into the hall for a Parsifal lest one unsuspectingly turn into a Nazi upon exposure to the moral taint of the music of an anti-Semitic jerkwad. Now will we have to do the same thing before watching “The Pianist”?

What strikes me particularly oddly about the protestors at the film festival comes to mind when I think about the reaction I’ve consistently gotten whenever I state my position on the issue (Polanski the man matters not, but leave the legacy of his movies alone.) Regardless of what I actually say, people jump back with howls of “So, because he’s a great artist he gets a free pass, huh?” and “If he wasn’t some big fancy director he’d have gotten life in jail already!” The message of which, filtered through all the populist screeching, is “art has nothing to do with this, it’s a purely legal case.”
Fair enough. True enough. But so……why are those same people out for Polanski’s head protesting at a film festival where Polanski’s work isn’t even featured this year?! Attacking him as a director, implicitly and explicitly, because of a personal, moral and legal–BUT NOT ARTISTIC–failing.
The whole nasty affair and all its attendant side-issues was still roiling in my irritated mind as I walked across 72nd street. A statue of Verdi glowered majestically at me from a tall pedestal flanked with Muses. Harrumph, I wondered, what happens if someone finds a letter in Verdi’s handwriting addressed to an inappropriate mistress, or confessing an illegal and ruinous opium habit to a friend? (That would explain parts of Aida, btw.) Will we get protesters clogging up the line for tickets at the Met, and spray-painting righteous slogans all over that poor statue? My metaphors just got lousier as I headed northwards and the sun headed downwards.

Why is it so impossible for people to accept the artistic worth and greatness of the works of a flawed man (be it Wagner, Polanski, the murderous Renaissance dissonance-meister Gesualdo, or some people’s idea of Shostakovich)? Do people actually believe that some aura of evil seeps into their creations and can easily rub off on anyone who dares come too near? (Subliminal proto-Nazi messages and allusions in the melodic contour of Hans Sachs’s arias? I’ve heard stupider theories.) Or is it simply a very easy and convenient way for people to loudly proclaim their own moral superiority? I pondered and grouchily pondered some more all the way to the Met, but got nowhere.

Thoughts of the nature of Art and Man and the Man As Artist were still rattling around in my brain as I began my exploration of the Ancient Greek galleries at the museum, when I noticed something utterly delightful and almost apropos. I was in the room of the oldest known Greek art, from the end of the Neolithic and beginning of the Cycladic period. Sculptures of human forms from that period are wonderfully modern in their primitivism, designed along bold, abstracted, elegant lines. Most striking are the faces–wedge-shaped and perfectly smooth and featureless except for oddly expressive noses. (Breaking news: Adrien Brody’s ancient ancestors discovered in Cycladic Greece.) But sitting on a shelf amongst half a dozen Zoubek-esque abstract female deities was the earliest known artistic representation of a musician, a seated man playing the kithara. This little figure came from exactly the same region and more or less the same time period as all the others, but this one was extraordinarily lifelike–not only were its carefully-sculpted hands and arms recognizably plucking at strings, but it had a FACE. Singing. Emotion and a certain artistic sensitivity showed on its features–in its eyes, on its lips, in the incline of its naturally-shaped head.
Maybe it’s only my ignorance of Ancient Greek art talking here. Perhaps there are plenty of other realistic, naturalistic Cycladic sculptures from that period and my little kithara player is no exception. But how nice it was to think, after my troubled musings on Man and Art, that four thousand years ago the Greeks knew what I’ve always suspected, that without art we cease to be human, that art is what MAKES us human. That nameless sculptor from the Cyclades certainly believed so–after cranking out a dozen expressive-nosed abstract women, he sculpted a musician, and made him spring to human life from the cold marble.
Maybe that, then, is why there’s always such an uproar over great artists who commit gross moral and human failings. Maybe on some deep-seated, instinctive level, we feel the sins of an artist as sins against humanity’s own being?

Pretty in Pink, originally uploaded by CVerwaal.

I liked how the tones of the stone blended perfectly with the pink of the girl. She somehow seemed to belong there. Taken with the Olympus Pen E-p1 and the 14-42mm kit lens.

Mosaïc heels, originally uploaded by CVerwaal.

One of the problems with some digital cameras is the shutter delay. The Canon G9 is no exception, although it is better than some point and shoots. In this case I saw the woman coming and pre-focused on the mosaic. I fired when she put her right foot on the floor and this is the result. I only had one chance.
Taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with my Canon G9.

Jack Goldstein’s 1978 piece, The Jump. Recently part of the fantastic exhibit, The Pictures Generation, at the Met. Goldstein’s three part piece, The Pull, 1976, completely captivated me for at least ten minutes, and that was before I came back for a second view after sauntering through the whole exhibit. The Pull was the first piece of the exhibit, showing three tiny figures falling or floating in space. It’s lovely when something so simple can command so much attention.

One of two Artforum reviews/Outside the Frame

Metropolitan heels, originally uploaded by CVerwaal.

It was a split second decision to take this picture. I happened to walk by this bench as the women crossed her legs creating a nice angle with her feet. The contrast with the patterns of the wooden floor really worked in my opinion. A moment later the scene had changed – she moved her feet and people walked in front of her. Interesting photo moments often last only a fraction of a second.
This shot just called out for high contrast BW, and I converted from RAW to BW using a photoshop plug-in set to “Ilford FP4, on hard paper” with 400 ISO grain. I sharpened the imaged just a touch.
Taken with my Olympus Pen E-p1 and the kit 14-42mm lens.

Reflections on Reality #4, originally uploaded by CVerwaal.

Continuing my reflections series, this is a scene I noticed from an interior window at the Metropolitan Museum while visiting the Japanese Galleries on the 2nd floor. The light was absolutely perfect in casting a silhouetted reflection of the glass wall of the Temple of Dendur gallery in a pool. I was lucky enough to have one visitor sitting on the ledge of the pool to complete my composition and to add a sense of scale to the image. The papyrus plants on the upper right work to soften the stark geometric design.
Taken with my Olympus Pen E-p1.

arrghhh….., originally uploaded by CVerwaal.

I love finding interesting juxtapositions of sculptures that make them come alive. Here Marsyas (by Balthasar Permoser ) cries out in pain as Lucretia (by Philippe Bertrand) stabs herself. Taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with my Olympus Pen E-p1 and the Zuiko 14-42mm kit lens. Converted from RAW to BW with a photoshop plug-in.

This is just beyond disturbing:

In a video made from 135 separate photographs taken at a United Nations function, Barack Obama had the same exact smile in every single one.

Here’s the video available via Donklephant.

In case you think this is just too bizarre to be real, you’re wrong.  Here are the 135 pictures, available via an official White House flikr site.  They were taken during a reception at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, New York.

Either we elected an automaton owned, programmed, and operated by some George Soros-type billionaire, or else we elected the world’s phoniest human being.

And either option is really scary.

Amy Herman at the Metropolitan Museum (with Sargent’s Madame X) asks her class of cops, “How would you describe this woman in one sentence?”

Early one morning a bunch of New York City police officers, guns concealed, trooped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inside a conference room, Amy Herman, a tall 43-year-old art historian and lawyer, apologized that she hadn’t been able to provide the customary stimulant. “I usually try to give you coffee with plenty of sugar to make you talk more,” she said.

The officers, all captains or higher in rank, were attending “The Art of Perception,” a course designed to fine-tune their attention to visual details, some of which might prove critical in solving or preventing a crime. Herman laid out the ground rules. “First, there are two words that are not allowed—’obviously’ and ‘clearly’—since what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to someone else. Second, no reading of labels. For purposes of this exercise, we are not focusing on who the artist was, the title of the work or even when it was created. Third, I want hands back, no pointing. If you want to communicate something, you have to say, ‘Up in the left-hand corner, you can see…’ “

Herman did not want to talk about brush strokes, palettes, texture, light, shadow or depth. Schools of painting and historical context were moot. Suspecting that some of the cops were first-timers to the Met, she tried to ease the pressure. “Remember,” she said, “there are no judgments and no wrong answers.”

She showed slides of paintings by James Tissot and Georges de La Tour. There was an Edward Hopper in which a hatted, forlorn-looking woman sits alone at a table, sipping from a cup.

“OK, what do we see here?” she said.

“A woman having a cup of coffee,” answered one of the cops.

“Unlike us,” another said.

Herman said, “Do we know it’s coffee?”

“If it was tea, there would be a spoon.”

“Or a pot, like in England.”

A Caravaggio appeared on the screen. In it, five men in 17th-century dress are seated around a table. Two others stand nearby, and one of them, barely discernible in shadow, points a finger—accusingly?—at a young man at the table with some coins.

Among the officers a discussion arose about who robbed whom, but they soon learned there could be no verdict. No one was being accused or arrested, Herman said. The painting was The Calling of St. Matthew, and the man in the shadow was Jesus Christ. The cops fell silent.

Later, Deputy Inspector Donna Allen said, “I can see where this would be useful in sizing up the big picture.”

Herman led the students upstairs into a gallery. The cops split into two- and three-person surveillance teams, each assigned to a particular artwork.

One team huddled in front of an enormous painting in which a heavily muscled man with close-cropped hair was being manhandled by a throng of armored ruffians and a buxom woman who was tearing off his shirt.

Robert Thursland, a 52-year-old inspector who looked trim and corporate in his gray suit, gave the class the skinny. The painting appeared to depict the end of a trial, and the muscle-bound fellow was “possibly being led off to be tortured,” said Thursland. The woman tugging at his clothes was part of the lynch mob, he added.

Herman revealed that the officers had been scrutinizing a 17th-century Guercino painting of Samson after his capture by the Philistines—the woman, of course, was Samson’s lover and betrayer, Delilah. That corroborated suspicions in the room as to victims and perps, and everyone seemed to agree the case could be closed.

In another gallery, a squat Congolese power idol, embedded with nails and gouged with holes and gaping gashes, appeared to be howling in pain. “When you came through these doors,” Herman said, “what struck you about him?”

Assistant Chief George Anderson, who commands the Police Academy, said with a sigh, “First thing I thought, ‘Boy, this guy caught a lotta flack. I kinda felt it was me.’”

Back in the conference room, Herman had the group pair up and take seats. One person faced forward while the other sat with his or her back to the screen. The officers who could see the pictures described them to their partners. One slide showed the well-known 1970 photograph of a teenage girl at Kent State kneeling beside a student who has been shot by the National Guard.

Anderson told his backward-facing partner: “The woman is obviously distraught.”

Ms. Herman scolded, “Uh-oh, I heard an ‘obvious’ out there!”

“Oops!” he said. “That’s the second time I did that.”

Another photograph showed two couples standing side by side. Herman cautioned that neither should be identified by name, only by body language. The consensus was that the younger couple looked happy, playful and brimming with enthusiasm, while the older couple seemed stiff, worried and ill at ease.

Eyeballing the older couple, Thursland offered, “They don’t know where they’re gonna be living come January. “

They were George and Laura Bush; the younger couple, Barack and Michelle Obama.

Herman, who grew up in Somerset, New Jersey, and earned a master’s degree in art history as well as a law degree, began her career as an attorney in a private firm. But after a while her lifelong love of art held sway, and she went on to manage programs at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, assist the director of the Frick Collection in Manhattan and give lectures on 19th-century American and French paintings at the Met (which she still does). She’s currently the director of educational development for the New York City public television station WNET. She began teaching her three-hour “Art of Perception” course at the Frick in 2004, to medical students at first. Then, over pizza one night with a friend who wondered why Herman limited her students to future physicians, Herman recalled a harrowing experience she had had while studying law at George Washington University.

Assigned by a professor to accompany police on patrol runs, she had raced with two cops to the scene of a raucous domestic dispute. Standing on the landing below, Herman watched one officer bang on an apartment door while the other nervously fingered his handgun. What the first officer saw when the door opened—a whining child, say, or a shotgun-toting madman—and how he communicated that information to his partner could have life-or-death consequences, she realized.

The following Monday, Herman made a cold call to the New York City Police Academy to pitch her course. And four months later, she was teaching NYPD captains at the Frick. One comment she remembers was an officer’s take on Claude Lorrain’s 17th-century painting Sermon on the Mount, in which a crowd gazes up at Jesus. “If I drove up on the scene and saw all these people looking up,” the cop said, “I’d figure I had a jumper.”

Herman, speaking to the class I attended, underscored the need for precision by recounting the murder of a woman whose body was not found for more than a year, partly, according to news reports, because of a commander’s vague instructions about where to look for it.

Anderson, who is often called to crime scenes, took the lesson seriously. Instead of ordering detectives generally to “search the block” for shell casings, weapons or other evidence, he said he would now tell them specifically to start at the far end, work their way back to the near end, look under all the parked cars, behind the gated areas, in the shrubbery, in the garages and in the trash cans.

One of Herman’s graduates, Lt. Dan Hollywood, whose last name seems well-suited to his Jimmy Stewart-like demeanor, said her pointers have helped snag pickpockets, handbag snatchers and shoplifters who prowl the Times Square area. Hollywood coordinates the Grand Larceny Task Force of 24 plainclothes officers. “Instead of telling my people that the guy who keeps looking into one parked car after another is dressed in black,” he explained, “I might say he’s wearing a black wool hat, a black leather coat with black fur trim, a black hoodie sweatshirt and Timberlands.”

New York’s finest aren’t the only law-enforcement types to benefit from Herman’s teaching. Other students have included U.S. Secret Service agents and members of the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, the Strategic Studies Group of the Naval War College, the National Guard and, during a visit to London, the Metropolitan Police of Scotland Yard.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of art’s crime-fighting power involved a task force of federal, state and local officers investigating mob control of garbage collection in Connecticut. One FBI agent went undercover for 18 months, and during that time, as it happened, attended one of Herman’s classes at the Frick. According to Bill Reiner, the FBI special agent who heads the task force, Herman’s exercises helped the undercover agent sharpen his observations of office layouts, storage lockers, desks and file cabinets containing incriminating evidence. The information he provided led to detailed search warrants and ultimately resulted in 34 convictions and government seizure and sale of 26 trash-hauling companies worth $60 million to $100 million.

“Amy taught us that to be successful, you have to think outside the box,” said Reiner. “Don’t just look at a picture and see a picture. See what’s happening.”

Herman has taken her lessons to heart. When her 7-year-old son, Ian, was in preschool, his teacher worried that he wasn’t verbal enough and suggested that Herman try some of her exercises on the boy. Herman pressed him to describe in detail what he saw when they were at home or on the street. “It worked!” Herman says. “We started talking about all the things we see and why we think they look that way, and he hasn’t stopped talking since.”

She encounters frequent reminders of her pedagogy’s impact. While riding the subway not long ago, Herman noticed two burly men giving her the eye. They were unshaven and dressed in shabby attire. They made her nervous, and she got ready to get off the train at the next station.

Then one of the men tapped her on the elbow. “Hey,” he said, “we took your course. We’re cops.”

Neal Hirschfeld’s latest book, Dancing With the Devil, the true story of a federal undercover agent, will be published next year. Photographer Amy Toensing is based in New York City.

"Funeral - St. Helena, South Carolina," 1955.

Compelling and fascinating Robert Frank’s disturbed and mournful song-of-the-road portrait of a new homeland now at the Metropolitan Museum.

M…, originally uploaded by CVerwaal.

The dappled shadows on the wall and the ground is what caught my eye. The girls on the bench, with their legs forming a giant M, were in my opinion a perfect counterbalance to the geometric shapes of the wall. Taken in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with the Olympus Pen E-P1 and the 17mm pancake lens. Converted to BW with a Photoshop BW Styler filter, set to Kodak Tri-X with 400 ISO grain and a red filter.

When we visited New York City in September 2009, we were delighted to discover that the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum was open to the public once again. 

In spite of some changes that in (Beth’s opinion particularly) make it a somewhat colder, less visually coherent space, it’s still one of the great interior spaces in American museums — an indoor piazza. 

The American Wing Cafe is open once again, and the prices are still reasonable. We were momentarily disturbed to realize that the windows have been frosted over.

“The view is gone!” we said. But there’s a good reason, which becomes apparent as soon as you climb the stairs to the newly-added mezzanine right above the cafe.

It’s a construction site out there, and the Met is simply preserving the esthetics of the American Wing experience.

The mezzanine itself, although it adds a ceiling to the Cafe that’s a little low for psychological comfort, is put to good use as an exhibit space.

Meanwhile, the piazza itself, while not as tranquil and intimate as it was before the remodeling, still has a variety of places for people to sit.

There is still a fountain. Like all fountains, or any element featuring water for that matter, it is extremely attractive to visitors.