The MIA presents its own masterpieces

Updated: October 14, 2009 - 10:13 AM

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Challenged by the masterpieces from the Louvre, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has added a free show of about 25 treasures from its own collection (open through April 11). Some would be on everyone's list of MIA hits, including Francisco Goya's famous self-portrait with Dr. Arrieta, who cured the artist of a near fatal illness. Museum director Kaywin Feldman picked that because it's so unusual for an artist to depict himself pale and feverishly disheveled.

Other masterpieces are more surprising, including an elegantly modernist plywood chair that Charles and Ray Eames designed after World War II. Mass-produced, it became a populist icon of 1950s functionality -- a masterpiece for the masses. An amusing 18th-century "Dragon Jar" from Korea features a long-snouted dragon cavorting above stylized clouds sailing through the creamy white sky. "Ganymede and the Eagle," by Danish neoclassicist Bertel Thorvaldsen, depicts the young Ganymede in lustrous white marble, wearing the cap of a French revolutionary and taming Zeus in the guise of an eagle.

The Minneapolis exhibit, much more modern than the Louvre's, also includes a pair of Ansel Adams' "Moonrise" photos, a "Mayan" fake, a spectacular William Blake watercolor, a Jasper Johns drawing and Francis Bacon's famous 1953 "Study for Portrait VI," of a screaming pope.

MARY ABBE