Author Archives: John

John Coffey is the Deputy Director for Art and Curator of American and Modern Art.

New Picasso, New Building

February 24, 2010 – 12:49 pm

John introduces the newest additions to the Museum collection, including our first Picasso

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Mending Wounds in the Judaic Collection

July 23, 2009 – 2:01 pm

Hard questions confront the curators when dealing with a prominent example of Judaic art.

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The Thing in the Window

March 18, 2009 – 10:06 am

Cebolla Church is in most respects a typical painting by Georgia O’Keeffe: a deadpan, apparently artless presentation of a subject in colors of bleached sky and adobe. I say apparently artless, because O’Keeffe is really being sly with the image. Note that she squeezes the church into the rectangle of the canvas. Still, it doesn’t [...]

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Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009

January 16, 2009 – 5:18 pm

The death of Andrew Wyeth today has reminded me of a story…
I met Wyeth only once. In the mid-1980s I was working as the curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. Early one summer the ladies at the Museum’s reception desk fluttered into my office, whispering that Andrew Wyeth and his [...]

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