I cried during my first visit to Vienna, in 1988. It happened in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where there are many moving and impactful paintings by artists such as Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, and Caravaggio. It was the Breughel gallery that caused me to weep. It’s a large room, empty save for the walls, which  ...

I cried during my first visit to Vienna, in 1988. It happened in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where there are many moving and impactful paintings by artists such as Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, and Caravaggio. It was the Breughel gallery that caused me to weep. It’s a large room, empty save for the walls, which  ...

It’s now one of the MIA’s most beloved artworks: Jade Mountain Illustrating the Gathering of Scholars at the Lanting Pavilion, carved in 1784. But a hundred years ago the 640-pound sculpture was used as a table centerpiece. You could do this if you were T.B. Walker, this was your table, and you owned the jade mountain. Bon  ...

Mercedes Knapp arrives at the MIA with a serving tray bearing a miniature menagerie. Some of the creatures are identifiable: koi fish, a lion, a sleeping deer. Others are more nebulous, with the rounded, fantastical features of anime. She calls them Puds, colorful little blobs that resemble nothing so much as gumdrops. She’s been making the cuddly creatures  ...

Mercedes Knapp arrives at the MIA with a serving tray bearing a miniature menagerie. Some of the creatures are identifiable: koi fish, a lion, a sleeping deer. Others are more nebulous, with the rounded, fantastical features of anime. She calls them Puds, colorful little blobs that resemble nothing so much as gumdrops. She’s been making the cuddly creatures  ...

Somewhere in these renderings, surely, is a pod chair with speakers piping atonal music. This is how architect Kenzo Tange’s 1974 minimalist addition to the MIA was expected to play out: the museum as mod social hub. Tange was a starchitect before anyone had thought of the term. He blended Le Corbusier’s modernism with traditional  ...

Somewhere in these renderings, surely, is a pod chair with speakers piping atonal music. This is how architect Kenzo Tange’s 1974 minimalist addition to the MIA was expected to play out: the museum as mod social hub. Tange was a starchitect before anyone had thought of the term. He blended Le Corbusier’s modernism with traditional  ...

Anyone entering Phil Barber’s studio in the belly of the MIA recently might think they had stumbled upon a Habsburgian Montessori class. On the floor were 190 pieces of paper that Barber had cut from the pages of a battered, leather-bound portfolio. Somehow the shapes would fit together to become the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian  ...

Paul Wunderlich had some groupies. Though it’s more likely that these art-loving young ladies scaling the MIA in 1969 were on the prowl for fellow Wunderlich fans, not the artist himself. It’s not hard to understand why: The German surrealist painter, printmaker, and sculptor, whose name literally means “strange” in his native tongue, was known for  ...

They stand close, but not too close, pillars of the museum with plenty of ideological daylight between them. This was January 12, 1955, amid a host of new acquisitions. Russell Plimpton (seated) had led the MIA as its director for 34 years. His soon-to-be successor, Richard Davis (on the right), was then the senior curator, already  ...