Can't make it to the Brooklyn Museum of Art? Is the Westmoreland out of reach? Visit our galleries and find some highlights of some of the country's great art museums. Included are selections from the Carnegie, Met, National Gallery and more.

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Concept Art Gallery has two paintings by Western Pennsylvania artist George Hetzel in an upcoming auction. The first, depicts a wooded scene with some less common features for a Hetzel work including a fence and a bright red tree. Rather than a summer scene in the deep woods, this fall scene clearly shows signs of human life and an altered landscape. A second painting is unsigned and features a deep woods stream. See the catalog

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This weekend saw two local events focusing on the art and antique community in Pittsburgh. In Wilkinsburg, an auction at Dargate saw the sell of many American and Continental European items including several pieces of Pittsburgh Glass. Among them, six Bakewell Glass Flutes brought $1,000 and a pair of Celery Vases brought $850.

Items relating to Pittsburgh could also be found at the Kerr Museum Antique Show held at the Oakmont Country Club. Paintings by Christian Walters and George Hetzel, among others, were offered along with an assortment of silver, furniture, glassware and period lighting.

Both the antique show and auction continue on Sunday should you like to participate. For information on the Kerr museum show, visit http://www.kerrmuseum.com/ and for Dargate visit http://www.dargate.com/ or log onto ebay live auctions.

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The Merchandise Mart International Antiques Fair™ returns to Chicago’s Merchandise Mart for its 11th year April 25-28, 2008, with the finest assortment of objets d’art and worldly treasures, as well as exciting new show elements. Known as the premier antiques fair in the Midwest, the Merchandise Mart International Antiques Fair provides collectors, connoisseurs, designers and the general public an intimate environment to see a broad range of antiques.

More than 130 of the top national and international antiques and fine art dealers will display a wide range of offerings from across the globe. Dealers will be displaying the finest in 20th Century Design, Architectural Design, Asian Art & Antiquities, Barometers, Ceramics, Coins, Decorative Arts, Folk Art, Furniture, Glass, Jewelry, Paintings, Posters, Prints, Rare Books and Maps, Sculpture, Silver, Textiles, Tribal Art and more. This year’s Fair will also feature the return of dealers from the famed Marche aux Puces in Paris and members of LAPADA, Britain’s hallmark of quality antiques dealers.

The Merchandise Mart International Antiques Fair will once again be an exciting component of Artropolis, a world-class, city-wide celebration art, antiques and culture with Art Chicago at its centerpiece. The multiple art shows under the Artropolis umbrella enable attendees to enjoy a diverse selection of art, prints, sculpture and other three dimensional forms from antiquities to contemporary art. As part of Artropolis, the Fair presents attendees with ideas on how to mix 20th Century furnishings with contemporary art.

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Every once in a while you look at a painting and recognize similarities, in feeling if not structure. Sometimes these similarities are obvious, and sometimes they are not so obvious.

A obvious example, or what seemed obvious to me anyway, was a painting in the Butler Museum of American Art. William Gropper's "The Youngstown Strike" reminded me of Picasso's "Guernica." It would seem this similarity may have been intentional as Gropper related the events.

"The Youngstown Strike" is one of the most gripping social protest works of the period. The painting was apparently prompted by the extended strikes staged in 1936-37 by workers at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, Youngstown, Ohio. During these years chaos frequently reigned throughout much of the city. In one incident, following a savage confrontation with police guards by workers and their families, the police tear gassed and shot at the workers; two strikers were killed and twenty-eight injured. The positioning of figures in Gropper's painting make anything other than an intentional similarity unlikely.

If you didn't pick up on it yet, random events come up randomly and sometimes songs sound similar even when the writers are unfamiliar with another's work. The problem with my theory is Guernica and the Youngstown Strike were painted in the same year. Instead of one work being based on another, the similarities were the result of a zeitgeist gripping the age.

Picasso's painting of course shows the horrors of war, and for what at first may seem like an odd parallel has even been compared to Davinci's "The Last Supper." Guernica depicts the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured. (While living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, Picasso suffered harassment from the Gestapo. One officer allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in his apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did.") While the Youngstown Strike event happened in 1916, Gropper painted it in the depths of the Great Depression in 1937.

Guernica was initially exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Perhaps he saw Guernica in a magazine, but it doesn't appear Gropper was in Paris. In 1937 he was in the American West witnessing the dust bowl.

Another example of similarities in paintings may be a bit more of a stretch. At the Westmoreland Museum of Art show on John Sloan, his painting "Election Night" somehow brought to mind Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party." Its not so much Sloan's dark painting of gritty New York that recalled Renoir's colorful work, but they way the characters interact-or avoid meaningful interaction. Each painting has a general good humor about it and yet to each individual character it doesn't seem to matter whether another is there. Renoir's work is slightly different in that some characters are interested in others, only that other has a mind somewhere else.

Many of the Sloan works are from the Delaware Art Museum and are currently on display at the Westmoreland. The Youngstown Strike is permanently at the Butler.

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