Monday, April 7, 2014

Coastal Virginia Magazine: The Chrysler Comeback


You'll want to get the print edition (on greater magazine racks now) because of the gorgeous  photos, but you can read my cover feature on the expansion of Norfolk's Chrysler Museum of Art at the Coastal Virginia Magazine website. It begins:

The older man loved to wander around the Chrysler Museum galleries. Lurking among the early modernist paintings and Tiffany glassware, the modestly-dressed septuagenarian would approach random visitors and ask, “‘What do you think about this piece?’ or ‘Do you like that sculpture?’”
“He’d chat with them for awhile,” Jeff Harrison recalls, “and he’d laugh and wander off. The visitor would invariably ask, ‘Who was that?’
‘That’s Walter Chrysler.’”
Harrison, the Chrysler Museum’s head curator, belts out a huge laugh, reveling in the 30-year-old memory. “Mr. Chrysler really didn’t stand on ceremony.”
In 1971, when the son of the founder of the Chrysler car company left his voluminous and ever-evolving art collection to the museum that now bears his name, he put Norfolk on the art world map. But the man who was once called an “art tycoon” was unpretentious, Harrison recalls. “He drove an old Plymouth station wagon. Like a lot of collectors, he sunk every dime into his collection.”

Read "Art Unveiled" by Clicking right here.

For more on The Chrysler Museum of Art, which reopens on May 10th, go to http://chrysler.org.

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