Dahesh Now

• The New Yorker The Critics The Art World: Going East: Napoleon at the Dahesh (Peter Schjeldahl)
• New York Post Review of Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt (James Gardner)
• Gay City News Review of Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt
• The Art Newspaper Review of Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt
• New York Daily News Review of Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt
• New Jersey Star Ledger Review of Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt
• The New Yorker: Goings On About Town
• New York Times Review of Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt
• New York Sun Review of Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt
• New York Times Review of Stories to Tell
• NY Sun Review of Stories to Tell

 

Stories to Tell: Masterworks from the Kelly Collection of American Illustration is a captivating—and obliquely provocative—exhibition... What strikes you immediately is the painterliness, frequent bravura, and linear grace everywhere on view... This sympathetic exhibition suggests democratic culture has more at stake in the character of advertising than in so-called fine art. The popular soul does not depend on ever-expanding museums or gallery goods; it lives in intricate dialogue with mass-produced images... Perhaps the charge of naiveté dismissively thrown at illustrators of this era is better directed at inflated claims for fine art.
– New York Sun, Maureen Mullarkey, February 16, 2006

 

I thought the [Illustration] show was wonderful! In all honesty, I left planning my return visit. I think it's going to be a big hit... you articulated the justification for it beautifully. This is like academic art in that it owes a debt to that style, is concerned with the human figure, and tells a story—it is (a) perfectly credible and (b) a nod to pop culture. There is also a thick strain of romanticism in the works — pirates, knights, princesses, aviators, Monte Cristo (I love this picture) — that we don't associate with the Dahesh. It has a raw, vital energy... I'm totally in love with it.
– Bob Madison, Member

 

The exhibition is both a visual delight and an enlightening exploration of the many ways through which France's adoration of Homer mirrored its struggle to find its own cultural identity.
– The National Herald, Zoe Tsine, October 22, 2005

 

The Dahesh Museum's "The Legacy of Homer" [is] a remarkable show in a museum that, in the year of its 10th anniversary, has emerged as one of the gems of New York.
– The New York Sun, Gary Shapiro, October 14-16, 2005

"But modernism aside (which is where the Dahesh would like to keep it), the museum encourages us to savor these artists' abundant technical skills. And today, when few art students even learn to draw, this emphasis on the painter's craft is practically a countercultural statement."
– Newsday, Arielle Budick

 

"French Artists in Rome is a welcome rebuttal to almost a century of modernist orthodoxy. It places on felicitous display the unique pleasures of academic art. The museum will come as a revelatory surprise to those unused to viewing academic art of this period en masse -- and most visitors will fall into this category."
– Times Literary Supplement, Paula Marantz Cohen

 

"Both scholars and the general public will find the new Dahesh an invigorating aesthetic experience. The Dahesh reminds us that the 19th century was a more polymorphous artistic milieu than we had thought; it also opens our eyes to the lessons academies still have to teach us as we enter the twenty-first century."
– American Arts Quarterly, Gail Leggio