High Museum of Art

This guide to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta centers on curator J. Carter Brown, freshly retired from the National Gallery, and the show he built for the nineteen ninety-six Olympics by sorting borrowed masterpieces not by country or century but by feeling, one gallery for each ring on the Olympic flag. You'll hear how Rings, Five Passions in World Art fit into the city's four-year Cultural Olympiad, and why critics who admired the ambition still grumbled it played more blockbuster than scholarship. Stand in the same remodeled galleries Brown filled that summer and picture the crowds it drew while the world's attention was on the sprinters a few miles away.