Museums Europe

Pontus Hulten, a visionary art impresario who embraced artists of many persuasions, conceived of museums as public forums for mind-bending experiences and infused his ideas into the foundations of several major institutions, including the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, died Wednesday at his home in Stockholm. He was 82. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm announced his death but did not state the cause.

Take an elevator to the third floor of the Ahmanson Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, turn right, walk a few steps and you'll come face to face with a chunk of Afghanistan's cultural legacy--imposing stone figures that curiously morph classical Roman details with elements of ancient Indian art.

It takes piles of money and power to commission projects destined to become pinnacles of art history. Sometimes it also takes a bit of royal boredom. Just listen to Timothy B. Husband, curator of the Cloisters Collection of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He's providing some background on "The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry," an exhibition opening Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum. "Jean de France, duc de Berry, was son, brother and uncle of successive kings of France.

While lethal riots persist in the Middle East and American cartoonists and editors wring their hands over what it means to publish pictures of Muhammad, the Western world's curators of Islamic art whisper and wonder. As they understand it, the Koran does not forbid representations of Muhammad, though other revered texts have led millions of Muslims to scorn the idea. They know that many Islamic artists have taken on the subject.

Forty-two years ago, a young astronomy student took a stroll through New York's Museum of Modern Art that changed his life. Then a graduate student at Harvard, Eugene Epstein had been to New York a few times before, and when he walked into the museum that day, he certainly wasn't expecting to be so thoroughly seduced by a single work of art.

It was a strange decision for a mammal. To turn back, 300 million years after vertebrates first colonized land, and crawl back into the sea. Yet it's exactly what the ancestors of whales did. There's never been any question that whales are mammals--they breathe air, are warmblooded and give live birth to young they nurse with milk. They even sport some hair, in the stiff whiskers around their mouths. But just what was the whale's last ancestor on land?

A white swan watched as we pumped up our inflatable canoe beside the Mosel River. It was 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday in this city founded by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago. The nearest navigation marker on the river bank is numbered 191, which meant that my wife and I could look forward to paddling 191 kilometers, about 122 miles, beneath vineyards and past ancient wine villages to reach Koblenz, where the Mosel flows into the Rhine.

The dealer had heard about the two young artists who spent the occasional evening ransacking a hotel room, ripping apart phone books, writing on the walls and getting stoned. Even the artists weren't sure this was art. But Jeffrey Deitch was. He handed them keys to his SoHo gallery and for almost a week they crammed it with 2,000 shredded phone books, and stabbed a broomstick and broken wine bottles in the walls for "Nest," a show that was to remain there for a month. It didn't even survive the raucous opening night party.

Corporate sponsors of art exhibitions traditionally count the returns on their cultural investments in terms of philanthropy, community goodwill and image improvement. But times are changing, and one need look no further than the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's current exhibition, "Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention." The show of furniture, films, photos, documents and prototypes has been well received by critics and the public alike.

Finding a French Impressionist or 20th-Century American painting in Madrid was once as difficult as finding a restaurant open as early as 8 p.m. The Prado Museum is surely one of the half-dozen most wondrous art museums in the world; only a wastrel would come to Madrid and skip it. But the Prado, based on the taste of long-ago kings, has great gaps. The museum world of Madrid, however, is spinning.