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Boston arts institutions flexed their muscles in 2011

Boom town!
By GREG COOK  |  December 28, 2011

SEPARATION ANXIETY
Man Ray could never quit Lee Miller, the scintillating former magazine model who came knocking on the Surrealist's door in 1929 seeking to learn photography. They were together in Paris for just four tumultuous years before she dumped him to make it on her own. "Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism," organized by Phillip Prodger at the Peabody Essex Museum, rounded up Ray's subsequent painting of her lips, sculpture of her eye, letters, and gifts to highlight his magnificent and kind of creepy obsession. The show — along with exhibits of Dutch masters from the van Otterloo collection and of Hudson River School painting from the New York Historical Society — was another demonstration of the scope and mastery of the Salem museum's program, making it ever more the peer of the MFA. Then in November, the PEM announced that it had raised $550 million (of a $650 million goal) to expand and endow the museum, besting the $504 million the MFA raised for its recent building projects and endowment.

READ MORE: "Review: Man Ray and Lee Miller at the Peabody Essex Museum," by Greg Cook

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  Topics: Museum And Gallery , Institute of Contemporary Art , Museum of Fine Arts , Peabody Essex Museum ,  More more >
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