I spent a few hours rambling around the Met this week and saw the survey of Raqib Shaw’s opulent jewel-encrusted paintings based on Hans Holbein […]
Museum Exhibitions
Are today’s emerging artists yesterday’s Mad Men?
Clever ideas–once confined to the brainstorming sessions of Mad Men and corporate art directors– have become the backbone of contemporary art practice, especially among recent […]
Shows I’d like to see: “Oranges and Sardines” at the Hammer
Curator Gary Garrels worked with six abstract painters”Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool” to select one of […]
Miro Miro on the wall
The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl on the Miroshow at MoMA: “‘I want to assassinate painting,’ Joan Miro is reported to have said, in 1927. Four […]
Philip Pearlstein’s “saucer of formalism”
The Montclair Museum’s retrospective of Philip Pearlstein’s work includes an award-winning artwork from high school, expressionist works of the 1950s, post-1961 female and male studio […]
Roberta and Elizabeth, BFF
In the NY Times Roberta Smith calls Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits girly. “By fits and starts, this exhibition reveals the complicated fusion of the personal, the […]
Morandi: “I don’t ask for anything except for a bit of peace which is indispensable for me to work.”
The big Giorgio Morandi survey that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum features over 100 paintings, drawings, watercolors and etchings. In the New Yorker […]
Rouault’s comedy of errors
The current exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art reveals Georges Rouault’s keen sense of disjunction, unintended consequences, and ironic reversals. This irony (a sometimes […]
Geo/Mattera visits MoMA
Joanne Mattera saw the Geo/Metric print and drawing show at MoMA, and reports back with a jpeg-rich two-part post. The show surveys the recurring and […]
Sharon Louden lights up Birmingham
In The Birmingham News Michael Huebner reports that The Birmingham Museum of Art has commissioned New York artist Sharon Louden to create 12 paintings that […]
Roberta Smith’s advice to young artists: Learn to paint
In the NY Times, Roberta Smith reports that the artists included in “How Soon Is Now?” the 28th version of the annual culmination of the […]
J.M.W. Turner’s poetic visualization of British history
Turner has arrived in New York. In The New Yorker, back in September, when the exhibition was opening at the National Gallery, Simon Schama wrote […]
Piet in Pitt
If you’ve never been to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, you probably haven’t seen many of the Piet Mondrian paintings on view at the Andy […]
Clement Greenberg vs. Harold Rosenberg
In The New Yorker Peter Schjeldahl reports that The Jewish Museum’s chief curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, has focussed “Action/Abstraction” on the writers, interspersing paintings and […]
The art of Jersey
Presented by the Morris Museum, New Jersey Then & Now, traces New Jersey’s depiction in representational art from the 18th century through today. Dan Bischoff […]
The utopian promise of Modernism at the Aldrich Museum
“Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture” presents two-dimensional work that explores the architecture and utopian ideas of the modern period. “The artists are […]
“Someone is going to come ’round here and buy all my paintings at one time for $40,000.”
Earl Cunningham (1893 – 1977), a prolific landscape artist who worked from memory, is considered a “folk modernist” whose work conveys some of the complex […]
The complex privacy of James Bishop
James Bishop’s relatively rare drawings and paintings— which American poet and art critic John Ashbery once called “part air, part architecture” — combine European and […]
March museum openings
At artnet, a roundup of exhibitions opening in March includes Directions — Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Color […]
Doig retrospective opens in London
Using photographic images from newspapers or snapshots as a starting point, Peter Doig recasts everyday imagery to make imaginary landscapes and figure scenes. All are […]
