Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Saturday, April 1, 2023
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is arguably Noah Baumbach’s best movie since The Squid and the Whale, and seems sure to advance his putative destiny of becoming Woody Allen�s successor as the ranking cinematic chronicler of the artily exasperating New York state of mind. Like the […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Evident in the transfixing Bruce Conner retrospective �Bruce Conner: It�s All True� at MoMA is a probing eye that seeks out departure of one kind or another. Eclectic and countercultural, his rather Rauschenbergian arc reflects the artist�s energetic and sometimes unsubtle insistence on embracing the […]
Contributed by Casimir Nozkowski / I grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a building that was once a synagogue, a whiskey still, a raincoat factory and when I was born there, a studio for my artist parents [Thomas Nozkowski and Joyce Robins]. They moved in after […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Victor Kanefsky�s effervescent documentary Art Bastard casts 76-year old New York painter Robert Cenedella as a kind of aesthetic Robin Hood who robs from hallowed art tradition to give ordinary people bravura paintings that don�t require them to plumb art history or some other arcane […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Russian director Alexander Sokurov�s Francofonia is a strange and intriguing film � a kind of avant-garde point-of-view documentary. Do not mistake the title for �Francophilia.� With considerable snideness and mockery � including magical realist interventions by a fatuous Napoleon, sardonic intonements of �libert�, egalit�, faternit�,� […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Two new films concern edgy women of the New York art scene: Lisa Immordino Vreeland�s Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict and Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, a moving meditation on dying and love. Vreeland builds a portrait of the visionary gallerist, proto-feminist, and renowned libertine […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Bridge of Spies begins and ends with a painting. Steven Spielberg�s latest film is a penetrating and affecting consideration of the Cold War, based on a celebrated real-life spy swap between the United States and the Soviet Union. The painter in question is Rudolf Abel […]
I was watching House of Cards last night, Season 3, Episode 3–the one in which the coarse and cagey Russian President Petrov makes a state visit to the White House. At one point (spoiler alert) , before his relationship with the Underwoods goes south, Francis gives Petrov a gift of […]
Guest Contributor Jonathan Stevenson / In the watching, video artist Shannon Plumb’s debut feature Towheads, which MoMA screened last week and has wisely purchased for its permanent collection, comes across as Chaplin meets Cassavetes. Seemingly just for the sake of her two blonde boys, Penelope, a downcast blonde woman […]
Director Greg Mottola (Daytrippers and Superbad) has been called the new John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, etc.), but Mottola’s films are much grittier, infused with a singular indie-angsty sophistication. In New York, David Edelstein writes that Mottola “plays old songs in new keys and […]
Two Coats Obituaries