The Harvard Art Museums Have Some Great Stuff

If you only have time to visit one art museum in the Boston area, it should be Boston's Fine Arts Museum. Impressively vast as the FAM collection is, it is supplemented by the holdings of the Harvard Art Museums. There are three of these (not including the Pacific artifacts of the Harvard Peabody Museum): the Fogg Museum collection of European and American paintings, the Busch-Reisinger (connected to the second floor of the Fogg without an entrance of its own) with German and Austrian art (paintings, a few sculptures, furniture) from before the Nazis came to power and labeled such art "degenerate"), and half a block from the Fogg, The Sackler Museum with Asian and Japanese art, plus some Greek and Roman antiquities.

The Arthur M. Sackler Museum has a very strong holding of Chinese Buddhist sculptures, particularly from western China. It has some black-figure Greek vases plus some red figure ones. The FAM has an exceptional collection of Japanese art of all sorts, including Buddhist sculpture, but a less impressive collection of Chinese sculpture. The FAM has many red-figure Greek vases, but no black-figure ones.

The Fogg/Busch-Reisinger similarly supplements the FAM with a painting by Emil Nolde, a great Franz Marc (red horses), many works by Arnold Beckmann and Joseph Beuys, a couple of Toulouse-Lautreacs including a very unusual outdoor one, called "Black countess" showing a horse-drawn carriage. There are four or five Gaugains, one Polynesian ("Poème barbe" from 1896), the rest pre-exile, including an interesting 1876 self-portrait. Boston must have loved Degas, because, in addition to the fairly extensive Degas holdings of the FAM, there are more interesting Degas paintings in the Fogg, including one of a cotton mart in New Orleans.