In 1938 or ’39, a boy of five or six, or maybe seven, was so enthralled by the beauty of a postcard of the Empire State Building that he took his entire five-cent allowance and bought five of them—all exactly the same image. “I can see that postcard today,” Leonard Lauder said of the purchase that turned him into a collector for life. And though he is known widely for his unsurpassed cache of Cubist art and his many gifts of blue-chip American art to the Whitney Museum, Lauder has maintained an obsession with micro-pictures all his life. He owns about a hundred and twenty-five thousand postcards—at the moment.

Judith H. Dobrzynski looks at Leonard Lauder’s postcards (“miniature masterpieces”), currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. See more on Lauder, plus a slideshow.

“What are those?” a recent museumgoer wailed, pounding small fists against a display case.

“Stop that!” the boy’s mother answered. “They’re blocks, O.K.?”

“But what’s inside the blocks?” the boy yelled. “What’s inside the blocks?”

Emma Allen on the exhibition baffling younger visitors at the MoMA: “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000”: http://nyr.kr/TjCYNG

Photograph: Detail from Stahlromöbel, a loose-leaf sales catalogue for furniture offered by the Thonet Company, showing Marcel Breuer’s B341/2 chair and B53 table, 1930-31. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art/Department of Architecture and Design Study Center.

Winding beneath the magnificent halls of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, with its Da Vincis, diamonds, Greek statuary, Egyptian parchments, enormous number of paintings, mechanical peacock clock, and other treasures, there is a catacomb of cellars. It was into this windowless nether region—far below the Winter Palace’s expansive view of the waters of the Neva—that Maria Haltunen and I had cautiously descended. As I followed her through a narrow, imperfectly-lit corridor, full of large pipes and jutting wires, Haltunen gasped. “Look!” she said.

In the semi-darkness, a little being had appeared. He perched, a foot-tall shadow, on a water pipe.

“Oh, you are a fat one!” said Haltunen, jangling the chain of her I.D. pass like a talisman as she approached the pointy-eared creature. “How nice you are!”

Sally McGrane on the cats of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia: http://nyr.kr/SPKPSU

Photograph by Dmitry Lovetsky/AP.

On September 8th and 9th, artists throughout Brooklyn will open their studios to the public as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s “GO” project. Selections of work by the participating artists can be seen at the “GO” Web site, where you can also view a map and create an itinerary of studio visits for the weekend. The artists with the highest number of online votes will be exhibited this winter at the Brooklyn Museum. There are lots of wonderful photographers taking part.

Here’s a few artists whose studios Jessie Wender, from the New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog, is looking forward to visiting: http://nyr.kr/RZvvJe

(Source: newyorker.com)

The idea for “Tête-à-Tête,” a new show of works by African and African-American artists, curated by the artist Mickalene Thomas, has its roots in an event at MOMA called “Conversations: Among Friends,” which Thomas participated in alongside the artists Derrick Adams, Xaviera Simmons, and Clifford Owens. “I wanted to bring this discussion to a visual platform and space,” Thomas told me. “A ’tête-à-tête’ is one-on-one conversation between two people, back and forth. This type of call and response is the title and subject of the exhibition.” Click-through for a selection of the work, which is on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery through August 31st: http://nyr.kr/MAWByL

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Like every great cultural institution, the Met has an obligation to tell the truth, as best as it can.”  So why won’t they come clean about Gertrude Stein? http://nyr.kr/NWM8zy

Schiaparelli & Prada at the met: More Elegant than Revolutionary http://nyr.kr/K2xOCC

Cartoon of the day. For more: http://nyr.kr/yVUOOM