Sister Wendy's American Collection Box Set
Sister Wendy Beckett, a cloistered nun and Oxford-educated art scholar who became a most unlikely TV personality in Britain, takes an art appreciation tour across America, visiting six major art museums in this series from PBS. Strolling through the galleries in her flowing black habit, Sister Wendy looks like someone from another age, but her opinions are often quite modern. In the Metropolitan Museum in New York she speaks eloquently about native sculpture in the oceanic gallery as well as about works by great masters, and in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts she spends a few minutes discoursing about pop art and specifically Roy Lichtenstein's "Glass V." At the Art Institute of Chicago she delivers a succinct lecture on Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," noting how it was painted soon after Pearl Harbor and depicts a New York City rife with anxiety. She also visits the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum. Sister Wendy's insights are entertaining, and she has a unique gift for communicating the joy one gets from appreciation of great art.--Robert J. McNamara