Blog

Many works of African art refer to and derive meaning from an invisible realm beyond the material world, serving as conduits between the living and the spirits, as conveyed throughout the Cleveland Museum of Art's newest exhibition, Fragments of the Invisible. In the spirit of Halloween and MIX: Underneath, we go beneath the surface and examine the spirituality and power behind masks, particularly the Helmet Mask on view in the exhibition.

It is clear from examples that survive from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, that the crucifix, in the hands of a great artist, achieved the status of a consummate work of art. The Cleveland Museum of Art possesses a beautiful example of a large-scale, painted crucifix made in Pisa during the 1230s. The majestic Cleveland crucifix is one of the few elaborate painted Italian crosses in the United States.

One quick visit to the current exhibition at the CMA, Less is More: Minimal Prints, will illustrate the power behind such seemingly straight-forward art and explain how that initial reaction is not far from what was intended. The museum’s Curator of Prints, Jane Glaubinger, provides us with some explanatory background on this exhibition and its featured artists.

Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo is an in-depth examination of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s ancient bronze sculpture, a figure known since antiquity as Apollo Sauroktonos, or Apollo the Lizard-Slayer. The masterwork will be showcased alongside two ancient Roman marble copies, one on loan from the Louvre Museum, Paris, France and the other from the Liverpool World Museum. This is noteworthy since all three sculptures have never been displayed together before.