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New York City — 4 Incredible Art Museums
You'll probably need 3-5 hours just to see the permanent collection at the Met, according to Go City, the largest multi-attraction pass company in the world. This is horrible advice. To make matters worse, Go City highlights "some of the best and most famous" areas at the Met Museum for you to walk through and suggests you start with Greek…
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How To Find One Magical Museum of Art
Tired of cookie-cutter museums with antiseptic white walls and uninspired exhibitions, we started our search in New York City, then traveled to the Midwest, and finally flew to California in order to find a special home for art lovers — one magical museum of art. We visited the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Legion of Honor in…
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The Best of Boston — Gauguin, Monet & Sargent
When travelers tell us they plan to spend a week in New York, our initial response is to suggest that a 10-day visit to Boston and New York City would be ideal. For art lovers, Boston is a relaxed place to contemplate “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (shown below), the monumental mural Paul…
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New York City — Fashionable Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum
Through September 2, 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting “SLEEPING BEAUTIES — Reawakening Fashion,” a large show featuring over 200 garments spanning four centuries, including the “Butterfly” ball gowns circa 1955 (below) designed by Charles James. The hottest museum tickets in New York City during 2023 were for exhibitions focused on KARL LAGERFELD, VINCENT VAN GOGH, EDOUARD MANET…
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Chicago — See the Most Extraordinary Art & Architecture in the USA
During stressful times, when one hopes to gain perspective on life's complexities, the best tonic may be a walk by a lake or through a park, perhaps a boat ride to take in the creativity all around us, or an inspirational visit to a museum. As the poet and mystic Thomas Merton observed, "Art enables us to find ourselves and…
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Two Superior Museums of Art in the Heart of Vienna
After many visits to Vienna in recent years, we have chosen the Albertina Museum as Austria’s greatest venue for art. The Albertina is the largest museum of modern art in Central Europe. It also possesses 65,000 drawings and roughly 1,000,000 Old Master prints, making the graphics collection (founded in 1776) housed inside the Albertina the most important in the world,…
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Thyssen — the Best Museum in Spain
The best museum in Spain is in Madrid and, in our opinion, it is not The Prado. We have compiled a list of the best 10 museums for you to discover and enjoy in Spain; but first allow us to explain why we have chosen the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza as our pick for the #1 museum in Spain. The Thyssen possesses…
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The Leopold Museum — 3rd Greatest Museum in Vienna
Vienna’s Leopold Museum is the best place to feel the dynamic power of modern Austrian art. Housing around 6,000 works of art — including the world’s most comprehensive collection of the talented, enigmatic Egon Schiele — the Leopold Museum takes you on a journey from the 1860s to the Wiener Secession, through the stylish era of Jugendstil, and into Expressionism.…
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Monet’s Gift Is Now the l’Orangerie + Matisse, Hockney & Modigliani
The Musée National de l’Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris is housed in a relatively small building, and yet it is brimming with joie de vivre — an exuberant enjoyment and celebration of life! Originally constructed to house citrus trees during the cold winter of 1852, the l’Orangerie truly blossomed in the 1920s when the French State and Claude Monet transformed…
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MODERN ART & EXPRESSIONISM — The Best Paintings in Switzerland
Basel is a Swiss city blessed with a variety of museums. For a survey of art from 15th-18th-century Old Masters to Expressionism and Contemporary Art, we strongly recommend a visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel (where admission to the extraordinary permanent collection is free on Wednesdays from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. / 17:00 to 20:00 and the first Sunday of every…
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Smaller Can Be Better — Art Venues in Madrid 2024
Sometimes a one-hour visit to a museum fashions the perfect art experience, and one great destination where you may choose to appraise this theory is Madrid. We recently visited three art spaces centrally located in the capital of Spain that offer you surprisingly high-quality alternatives to the Big Three museums… without crowds and highly-priced tickets. Museo Sorolla The Sorolla Museum…
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Jacquemart-André — A Wonderful Little Museum in Paris
When Nélie Jacquemart acquired “Virgin and Child on a Throne” (pictured below) at the end of the 19th century she did not know who had created this important painting — for it was only later, in the 1930s, that this masterpiece was attributed to Giovanni Bellini. The Musee Jacquemart-André on Boulevard Haussmann was created from the private home of Nélie…
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A Unique & Fabulous Pilgrimage to the Marmottan in Paris
The world's largest collection of paintings by Claude Monet rests comfortably today in the leafy hamlet of Passy (a neighborhood absorbed into the City of Paris in 1860) inside a townhouse with Empire-style salons. This property was purchased in 1882 by Jules Marmottan, a lawyer and mining-company director who collected pre-Renaissance art from Germany, Flanders and Italy.
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The Most Magnificent European Display of Monet & Other Impressionists
The ambition of Oscar-Claude Monet (1840 — 1926) to capture on canvas the passing of the seasons and the changing of daylight transformed how we perceive nature and led the way to 20th-century modernism. If you have the opportunity to view the Hasso Plattner Collection in Potsdam, Germany, you will be enchanted by Monet’s devotion to painting outdoors and his…
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The Best Surrealism in Venice and Potsdam
The presentation of “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity” at the Barberini Museum in Germany (which was on view through January 29, 2023) provided a grand overview of the female and male Surrealists who were active for more than 50 years during the 20th century. The Barberini, where the amazing Hasso Plattner Collection of Impressionism is always on view, is displaying…
