cover image New York's Great Art Museums: Tours of the Permanent Collections

New York's Great Art Museums: Tours of the Permanent Collections

Robert Garrett. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, $15.95 (235pp) ISBN 978-0-930031-13-8

Imposing doors will open wide with this guide to 18 permanent collections in seven of New York's art museums, including the Cloisters, the Brooklyn Museum and the Frick Collection. Garrett highlights sculptures, paintings and artifacts and briefly explains the works' historic background and artistic merit as well as particulars of the creators' lives. One hundred black-and-white photographs and floor plans of the more complicated museums help orient visitors to the galleries. The Metropolitan's holdings are covered most extensively, as Garrett discourses on nine Met Collections, including Egyptian, Greek and Roman, and American art. Readers are offered a fuller appreciation of works by O'Keeffe, Hopper, Calder and others continually on display at the Whitney. The author's descriptions of famous favorites like van Gogh's Starry Night and more imposing masterpieces like Rodin's Monument to Balzac (both at MOMA) are free of pretension, academic clutter and overburdening facts. Garrett, who writes regularly on the arts for the Boston Globe, inspires with a warm, intelligent book that will make cultural pleasures more accessible. First serial to the Washington Post, Boston Globe and New York Daily News. (July)