IRMELI DESENBERG, an art historian who has...

IRMELI DESENBERG, an art historian who has taught in Orange County and elsewhere in Southern California since 1958, most recently at Newport Harbor Art Museum.

* Gateway Arch, St. Louis, by Eero Saarinen: “It’s aesthetically enormously pleasing. It’s a piece of sculpture, but functions as architecture. It’s very, very large, just by the Mississippi River, so that you see the river in a little different context. . . . Saarinen succeeded in making a monument to a historic moment in time.”

* “Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride” by Jan van Eyck, National Gallery, London: “It’s a Northern Italian Renaissance painting, which is much less flamboyant than (paintings from Southern Italy). It’s very gentle, the content is very touching. It’s a man and his wife holding hands after their wedding, and she holds a beautiful piece of silk in her hands and (the painting) makes her look as if she’s pregnant. There’s a mirror in the back (of the room), and he and his wife are reflected in the mirror and the colors are completely complimentary to each other. . . . It’s like a jewel, a small jewel.”

* “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe”, Edouard Manet, Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris: “That has twofold pleasure for me. It’s the beginning of the great break with the Renaissance vision, and it has a good outdoor feeling, and Manet has used color, both flesh color and blacks and greens, in the same rich manner that Goya and Velazquez did. . . . For me, it’s one of the high points of Manet’s art.”

* “The Dance,” Henri Matisse, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg: “I was there last summer, and I thought I’d never get to see (that painting) in my lifetime, and it almost made me cry. It’s a rendition of pure visual pleasure, delight and good things. He used these strong, very simple colors; it only has three colors, and yet it’s such a superb painting.”

* “Villa R.,” Paul Klee, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Germany: “It’s very small and very funny, and, of course, witty, and they are are very, very few witty paintings that aren’t caricatures or satirical. It’s not a (Paul) Conrad (political) cartoon! It’s delicate, it’s not sweet . . . Unlike the other three (paintings I listed), where the color predominates, Klee works with line. Since I grew up (nearby in Germany) during a period where he worked at the Bauhaus (School) in Germany, I have always known about him.”