Maybe it’s the woman’s mischievous look. Or something to do with clowns. But there’s a portent about this image—you sense the innocent child will somehow vanish behind the frame, as though passing through a portal. A trick of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination. The woman was facilitating make-believe—pretend you’re a painting!—with a stash of dress-up clothes at Mia’s 1981 Rose Fete.  ...

This painting, Destruction of the Beast and the False Prophet, has always drawn me in: the high drama, the fanaticism, the eeriness of the beasts. Painted by Benjamin West in 1804, it sits somewhere between neoclassical and Romanticism, a transitional piece. Classical/Biblical in subject matter and composition, but Romantic in its emotional and psychological content.  ...

Mia has hosted local art since the very beginning. A look back traces the ongoing dialogue in art circles of what, exactly, local art is. In 1920, about to open its sixth annual local art exhibition, the museum sought to downplay any regionalism, aspiring to something more universal: “The world is so bound together these days that there  ...

On October 18, Mia opens “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh,” a star-studded painting show with a historical sweep worthy of its protagonist. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir—they’ll all be here, along with the man they’re indebted to, Eugène Delacroix himself. Indeed, Delacroix has already arrived: In another of Mia’s birthday-year surprises, the French  ...

Look closely and you can see the name of Alfred Pillsbury under “lender.” It’s not hard: The cursive writing is clear as a carving, seemingly typed. As Mia’s registrars like to joke now, the primary job requirement for their predecessors long ago was good handwriting. And this person, probably a secretary in the director’s office,  ...

Kenzo Tange had resurrected Hiroshima, literally from the ashes. He designed a peace park in the city center and massive, modern buildings to house the thousands of bureaucrats who brought Japan back to life. An admirer of both Le Corbusier and traditional Japanese architecture, he built a bridge into the postwar period, and by the time he  ...

Radios have their own museums these days. But in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when this photo was taken of Mia director Richard Davis chatting with Florence Murphy and Pat Maloney on KUOM, radio was still the best way to communicate just about anything to a wide audience—including art history. Not long after the  ...

Stoic, vigilant, fierce—Mia’s guardian lions watch over the 24th Street entrance of the museum. Today, the lions are a symbol of Mia, featured on postcards, mugs, and prints in the Store at Mia. But prior to 1998, going back to when the museum was built in 1915, their pedestals were unoccupied. In the 1990s, Ella Crosby was looking  ...

Her handbag can talk. It’s a kind of proto-Walkman, a portable record player called Solocast. And it played some of the first audio guides that Mia rented to visitors. Actually, it’s not clear that the arrangement ever got that far. Solocast solicited the museum’s director, who seemed eager to buy. And there’s some correspondence about placing orders.  ...

Lucretia was lost almost as soon as Rembrandt painted her, in 1666. Her portrait wasn’t in the inventory of works remaining in Rembrandt’s house after his death, and if it went to a buyer it wasn’t noted. By the time that Herschel V. Jones came across the painting, in the mid-1920s, it was in the  ...