Beneath soaring ceilings, in a small, darkly painted gallery off the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two immense sunflower paintings hang side by side. The paintings are bigger than I expected them to be, big enough that when I watch people pose between them, their faces are the size of only one of the flowers. These paintings are sisters, not twins. Exhibited for the first time…

Calder Gardens is not so much a museum as it is a shrine to abstraction. The 1.8 acres of land it sits on is immaculately landscaped so that the flowers and grasses change throughout the year from vibrant, flowing, waist-high beauties in the summer to yellow in the winter. The Gardens, which opened in Philadelphia in September 2025, say that "the objects on view respond to architectural moments…

Claude Monet’s painting _The Path through the Irises_ is hard to ignore. First of all, there’s the sheer size of it—the canvas stretches six and a half feet high and over five feet across. _The Path through the Irises_ hangs center stage in its gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and if you have the time to linger, as I did on a recent Monday afternoon, you’ll notice the almost…