Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009
The Most Imposing Cantaloupe
By Sanford Schwartz
Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 17–August 23, 2009; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 23, 2009–January 3, 2010; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 31–May 9, 2010
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gretchen A. Hirschauer and Catherine A. Metzger.
Yale University Press, 178 pp., $60.00
One of the special pleasures in going to museums or looking through the odd survey of a museum's collection (or a private collection) comes in finding work by artists who are at once almost entirely unknown and stimulating in some way. If, in learning more about these figures, their work grows in fascination, we probably want it to be better known, though at the same time we half-believe it ought to remain a little buried. This isn't for fear that when seen in full this or that artist won't measure up but because as somewhat mysterious figures they add a welcome note of uncertainty and incompletion to our sense of the past.
Review, 2455 words
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