MUSEYON BOOKS Smart City Guides for Travel, History, Art and Film Lovers

  The relationship between the Van Goghs (Vincent and Theo) and Paul Gauguin was long and complicated. Theo purchased, sold, and commissioned the painter’s work while Vincent, then just a struggling artist and brother of a successful dealer, befriended and attempted to collaborate with the far more grounded and well-regarded Gauguin. It was a difficult relationship between the two, strained ... Read More »

  With a reputation as a genius of oils, a bon vivant, and a brawler, Michelangelo Merisi, known more popularly as Caravaggio, was bound to attract as many admirers as haters, as many compatriots as foes. Cleverly, a London-based gallery specializing in Old Masters, Whitfield Fine Arts, has collected the Roman master of chiaroscuro’s most fervent followers and detractors under ... Read More »

  With only 37 works in existence, it’s hard to find a Vermeer, let alone three of them, in any one place. Only five museums can boast that—the Frick (3), the Met (5), the Mauritshuis (3), the Rijksmuseum (4), and the National Gallery of Art in D.C. (4). By the way, in case you weren’t counting, that makes New York ... Read More »

  Not only are we used to directing you to the real-life physical locations of your favorite movies with our “Film + Travel” series, but we’re also accustomed to directing you to exhibitions held in solid, brick-and-motor galleries and museums. When it comes to the planned “The Art of Akira” project, however, neither the locations caught on the displayed film ... Read More »

  Those outside of the New York sphere may not know the scrappy institution known as Film Forum—a small three-screen theater on a lonely section of Houston Street dedicated to running on the best and most important of what cinema has to offer. Despite—or perhaps even in part because of—its “only in New York” awkward layout, Film Forum has become ... Read More »

Yes, it’s been 400 years since the infamous Italian artist and party boy Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio left this world under shadowy circumstances. To toast the life and death of Rome’s rock star of chiaroscuro, the Scuderie del Quirinale is offering up a look back at his work and influence in an exhibition starting on the 20th of this month. ... Read More »

  As an article over at Arts21 notes, “The new Chris Ofili mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain feels like walking through a mixtape of semi-obscure black American music from the last 50 years, created by a middle-aged record shop owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of musical history and a body odor problem.” Actually, it’s not just the backward glance that ... Read More »

  A fascinating little piece in the New York Times today looks at the once-contentious relationship between the Renaissance arts scenes of Florence and Rome through two current exhibitions just a few neighborhoods away from each other in Manhattan. While Rome is represented in one corner by the Morgan Museum & Library’s Rome After Raphael exhibition, which features a slew ... Read More »