rec.arts.theatre.musicals

On Feb 26, 9:04=A0pm, atsarisb...@ wrote:

> I hate to tell you this, Harlett, but the National Gallery in "You're
> the Top" is the one in . which the Mellons had just built and
> donated to the country, so it was in all the news headlines when
> Anything Goes premiered.

Feh!

If that's the case, I hope Porter meant it as a joke.

> (And the London NG collection, beside being atrociously overcleaned so
> that all the colors are dead, is not a patch on the Prado -- nor does
> it come up to the Kunsthistorisches Museum IMNSHO. Unfortunately for
> the British, Charles I's art collection was sold at public auction.)

I've not been to the Prado but the Kunsthistorisches Museum, while
nice, did not impress me as much as the London NG. Perhaps my
expectations were higher in Vienna and lower in London.

In fairness, I am probably not the most typical art gallery patron. My
main areas of artistic interest is the Italian rennaissance and French
impressionism/post-impressionism. In particular, work from 1700-1850
and post-WWII generally bores me to tears.

The I found the NG's renaissance collection to be, overall, the best
I've encountered outside of Italy and the impressionists, with the
possible exception of the Paris D'Orsay and the Barnes in
Philadelphia, just about the best ever. I found the overall scope of
the NG collection from the renaissance to the present day to be a
wonderful *overall* collection, offering one a fairly comprehensive,
easy to digest timeline from 1500 or so to the present.

And it's been a few years, but I did not notice the NG's collection to
have been scrubbed any worse than any collection I've encountered. Was
this a recent calamity? And, as a point of reference, would you find
the NG cleaning to be worse than, say, the Sistine Chapel?