Curators Noriko Murai of Temple University and the Gardner's Alan Chong re-create the feel of that room with their jewel-box installation. It reflects Gardner's typical eclecticism — snarling shaggy 15th-century Japanese wooden fu dogs, tiny silver and enamel 19th-century Chinese opium boxes, an 18th-century Japanese writing box dazzlingly decorated with gold and silver palms, a 19th-century Indian box intricately decorated with silver floral interlace, a 17th-century Japanese screen depicting scenes from The Tale of Genji. Gardner's Martha Stewart side comes out in a (re-created) door that she decorated with 24 woodblocks — not the prints, the blocks themselves, which intrigue with their intricate carving.
The black gallery walls and spotlights give everything a feel of majesty and reverence. And draw your eye to a 17th-century gilded-bronze Chinese Buddha seated on a lotus-leaf throne. He's awesomely calm.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Related:
Three's company, Review: Littlerock, Exposures, More 
- Three's company
The show's American curator, Frederick Ilchman, has snagged an improbable number of pairs and trios from the world's famous (and not so famous) museums.
- Review: Littlerock
Two young Japanese tourists, siblings Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto) and Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka), get stranded when their car breaks down in the California backwater of the title.
- Exposures
In "Karsh 100: A Biography in Images," which is now up at the Museum of Fine Arts, his iconic shots of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Hemingway are defining portraits of the men in all their crusty manliness.
- More than a feeling
The centerpiece of the Museum of Fine Arts' "Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs" is Candice Breitz's 2005 Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), a wall of 30 televisions, each showing a different Madonna fan singing a cappella to her 1990 greatest-hits compilation, The Immaculate Collection. They wear headphones, bob their heads, sing aloud to music we can't hear.
- David Hilliard at Carroll and Sons
It's not every day that a guy like me gets to enjoy a photographic investigation of daddy-boy relationships. . . . well, outside of a naughty format.
- Peabody rising
Could the Peabody Essex Museum be the Boston area’s most exciting art museum right now?
- Slideshow: X-ray reveals secrets of Tintoretto's painting
Jacopo Tintoretto’s painting Nativity , in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, has long puzzled scholars because of its odd composition.
- Afterglow
The installation is a bit of a shift for Whiteread, who’s best known for making plaster, rubber, resin, or concrete casts of old used mattresses, a staircase, the entire interior of rooms.
- Bon appétit!
Luis Meléndez himself greets you at the outset of "Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life" at the Museum of Fine Arts. He seems a haughty 31-year-old in this 1746 self-portrait, standing in a fine silk coat and ruffled shirt and holding up a chalk drawing (note the chalk in his hand) of a hunky nude dude.
- The rules of his game
Given that every theater season seems to bring a new production of a Chekhov play, it's surprising that so few movies have been made of his dramas, or of his short stories. Or maybe not so surprising: Chekhov is perilously difficult for filmmakers.
- Song of herself
"Listen, I will go on record saying I love Feist, I love Neko Case. I love that music. But that shit's easy listening for the twentysomethings. It fucking is. It's not hard to listen to any of that stuff."
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Culture and Lifestyle, Language and Linguistics, Japan, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Language and Linguistics, Japan, Painting, Visual Arts, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Less
