Ideas about Painting

Ideas about Painting

Two Pieros for Mary Hambleton

Contributed by Ken Buhler / One afternoon last summer I decided to go to the National Gallery in London. I was in upstate New York, idly turning the pages of a book of Italian paintings, when I came upon Piero Della Francesca�s Baptism. Its geometric perfection and its eloquence struck me […]

Ideas about Painting

Carter Ratcliff: Art in the age of Trump

Contributed by Carter Ratcliff / Let�s begin with a painting�not sure it�s a work of art�that could have been painted only now, during Trump�s presidency. This is The Republican Club, a group portrait of selected Republican presidents, by Andy Thomas.  Hanging now in the White House, it appeared behind Trump during […]

Ideas about Painting

Unlimited: Painting and political upheaval

Contributed by Sharon Butler / During the 1960s, the world was rocked by massive political upheaval. In May 1968, two weeks of student riots in Paris blasted traditional approaches seemingly across the socio-political board, from government to gender roles to education. Civil rights and anti-war protests roiled the United States. Africa fitfully […]

Jennifer Coates
Ideas about Painting

A brief history of food as art

The latest issue of Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly, called the “Atlas of Eating,” features travel articles related to food, such as “How Food Became Religion in Peru’s Capital City” and “The Humble Beginnings of Goulash.” Editor Jeff Bartholet invited me to contribute something about art and food, so I put together a short history of […]

Ideas about Painting

The backstory: Supports/Surfaces survey at CANADA

In 2011, seeing a relationship to the casualist tendency in contemporary art, I posted about Claude Viallat’s work and the inventive art movement known as “Supports/Surfaces” that took hold in the mid-1960s in the south of France. Expanding the notion of painting, Supports/Surfaces artists stressed the experimental use of non-art […]

Ideas about Painting

The Casualist tendency

This essay, which builds upon an essay about contemporary abstract painting that I wrote for The Brooklyn Rail in 2011, was just published in the January/February 2014 issue of Christie’s Magazine. —– Contributed by Sharon Butler / A few years ago, having operated safely within traditional painting strictures for decades, I […]

Ideas about Painting

The New Casualists

Contributed by Sharon Butler / The pioneers of abstraction�the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists�emerged from firm and identifiable aesthetic roots and developed their own philosophies. In the competitive maelstrom of 20th century art, those philosophies became dogmas, and the dogmas outright manifestos. In the new century, many abstract painters […]