A Fourth of July message from Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, rightly emphasizes the need for every generation of Americans to engage in thoughtful, informed reflection on, and debate about, our founding principles. His message focuses on the Constitution but, given its timing, it is of course […]
education, Frederick Douglass, July 4, Martin Luther King Jr.Nearly four decades ago, I produced an educational film entitled Books Our Children Read.1 It documented a constructive approach to resolving parent-teacher conflict over education in a rural Ohio school district, at a time when such conflict was erupting in violence in other American communities. The film focuses on the study of literature in the […]
A Day No Pigs Would Die, Allan Glatthorn, conservative values, controversial literature, parents vs. teachersWhat does a book report on the life of a nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) have to do with art and art education, the subjects I’m now immersed in? Quite a lot, as it happens. Never heard of Semmelweis? Neither had I until I read a historical fiction about him entitled The Cry […]
belief perseverance, Ignaz Semmelweis, institutional theory of art, Semmelweis Reflex, The Cry and the CovenantThe following letter was mailed to Daniel Brodsky, Chairman of the Met Museum’s board of trustees, on September 3rd. (I insert relevant links here.) In lieu of a response from him, I received a platitudinous letter from Jessica Hirschey, the museum’s Deputy Chief Membership Officer, dated September 17. That letter is appended below, along with […]
contemporary art, Max Hollein, Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe opening next week of the major exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art1 prompts me to post the following brief item about a little-known side of this master. The awe-inspiring grandeur of Michelangelo’s work earned him the reverent epithet of “Il Divino” among his contemporaries. It is therefore remarkable to […]
The best thing about the exhibition Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through September 20) is the light it sheds on the creation of Bingham’s wondrous Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), one of the treasures of the Met’s holdings in American art. Since […]
The Piero referred to in this blog’s title is the painter Piero della Francesca (c. 1412-1492), one of the masters of the early Italian Renaissance whose work I especially esteem. (For information on the banner image, see the caption below.) I dedicate the blog for his sake to commemorate the values he and his work […]
