Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:
“Welcome to the best-kept secret in Newark!” So said the smiling woman who took my $7 and admitted me last Saturday to the Newark Museum, whose superlative collection includes such marvels as a flawlessly installed Alexander Calder mobile, one of Arthur Dove’s pioneering abstract paintings of 1919, and “Laburnum II,” a small Hans Hofmann canvas so outrageously vital that I longed to tuck it under my arm and cart it back to my Manhattan apartment. What’s more, you can admire these masterpieces in blessed silence when you go there–because there’s a good chance you’ll be all alone. I spent an hour touring the two floors of “Picturing America,” the museum’s installation of its permanent collection of American art. During that time the only other people I saw were seven kids who breezed through the second-floor gallery….
As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.