Boston's Apollo, Late Bacon

Episode No. 442 features curators Nathaniel Silver and Alison de Lima Greene.

Silver is the curator of "Boston's Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent" at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The museum is temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic; pending re-opening, it has extended the exhibition through September.

The exhibition examines Sargent works for which McKeller, an elevator attendant at Boston's Hotel Vendome, modeled. Those works include the Sargent murals in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and drawings. The exhibition also includes historical materials that animate McKeller's life and his engagements with Sargent. The terrific exhibition catalogue was published by the Gardner and distributed by Yale University Press. Amazon offers it for $44.

On the second segment, de Lima Greene discusses "Francis Bacon: Late Paintings" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The museum is temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. "Bacon" is scheduled to run through May 25. The exhibition, which was organized by the Centre Pompidou, considers the paintings Bacon made between 1971, as he prepared for a major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, and his death in 1992. The exhibition was curated by Didier Ottinger; de Lima Greene organized the Houston presentation.