I’M IN DALLAS, and just visited the Meadows Museum, which you really should not miss if you’re ever in this area. It’s on the SMU campus, and features a terrific selection of Spanish art, from the end of the Middle Ages through the 20th c.–El Greco, Goya, Ribera, Zurbaran, Miro… you get the picture. (Sorry for no accent marks! I’m in the business center of a Best Western and don’t have time to do them.) There’s also one Giacometti.

I really wish the museum had a book of its collection. Oh well.

One extra-cool thing about the second-floor galleries is their arrangement: chronologically in a big circle. So the first room starts in, if memory serves, the last quarter of the 14th c., and then you go room-by-room until you hit the cubists and Miro and all that jazz… and then you’re back with the medievals again.

This was great for me because I have a really hard time with both the medieval works and the modern ones, but seeing them right next to each other made me see how much they have in common with each other, especially in contrast to the Renaissance-through-1900 works I love, which are generally in that darkness-and-whiteness, brooding, exalted Spanish style.

The medieval and 20th-c. works were more iconographic, more alphabetic, less focused on personality. When they showed a cow it was The Cow, not this cow here. The medieval and modernist faces aren’t selves in the same way, with the same internality; or else I can’t see it, maybe. The textures and colors were very similar too: flat textures, no depth of field, and superhot, rich, highly contrasting colors–like those DC front yards where the hot pink azaleas are planted right next to the orange ones and the purple ones. Deep orange and deep blue lying against one another in huge flat blocks.

So, just some very scattered thoughts….

My other note on Dallas is that the very first mulberries are already out!–and yet the bumblebees came to DC before they came here, which seems utterly perverse.