An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, December 18, 2025
John Adams Griefen (b. Worcester, MA, 1942; d. Bergerac, France 2025) was an American artist and early Color Field painter who made important contributions to abstract art in the United States and in Europe. In his successful career as a painter he had seventeen solo exhibitions in New York City, the first at age 27. Foremost, Griefen is known for the essence of color in his paintings, and for many years, he made large, often monumental, acrylic paintings on canvas.
Contributed by Adam Simon / At some point, my IG algorithm sent me a clip of Brian Eno talking about how the term ‘genius’ should be replaced with ‘scenius’ because no artist works in a vacuum. Artists all come from some version of a scene, however small. Perhaps no one illustrates this better than Tina Girouard, who died in 2020 and whose work can currently be seen in NYC at two galleries, Magenta Plains and Anat Egbi, and at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). During the 1970s, Girouard was instrumental in founding 112 Greene Street…
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The California painter Wayne Thiebaud died on Christmas Day. He was renowned, first and foremost, for his paintings of candies, cakes, and pies, which he first started exhibiting in New York in the 1950s. He later become known for his surreally steep California landscapes, paintings of the flatlands of Californias midriff, and his lonely, isolated figures. To be sure, the gods were with this painter. Not only did they let him live to the magnificent age of 101, but, up until the end, they gave him lifelong vigor that allowed him to fulfill his passion to work in his studio just about every day. His death makes painters like me feel a real personal loss.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A clear strain in American letters celebrates the capacity of insouciant and unabashedly disreputable people to say things that matter by cutting through the flatulent smog that tends to enshroud orthodoxies. The Lost Generation had Ernest Hemingway, and Baby Boomers had Hunter S. Thompson and Dave Hickey, who passed away in November at 82. These guys particularly Thompson but undeniably Hemingway and Hickey as well showcased their disdain for convention and their embrace of the drunken and the stoned, the naughty and the down-and-out. But all three were dead serious about life and death, and that emerged in their work.
According to ArtForum, influential Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser (b. 1930) has died. The Deinze-based painter had a reputation for a rigorous attention to painting […]
Roberta Smith reports in the NY Times: “Alan Uglow, an abstract painter of light-filled geometries whose expansive fields, bordered with notched lines, reflected in part […]
William Grimes reports in the NY Times that Nathan Oliveira, a leading Bay Area artist who achieved national prominence fusing Abstract Expressionism and figuration in […]
“And Half,” 1959 “Back and Front,” 1960 “Play,” 1960 “Epigram,” 1961 “Galore,” 1966 “Interlock Color,” 1973 “Verdancy,” 1981 “Refresh,” 1999 Roberta Smith blogs at […]
Michael Goldberg , an 83-year-old Abstract Expressionist and husband of artist Lynn Umlauf, died in his Bowery studio on Sunday, apparently of a heart attack. […]
In ArtForum, Linda Yablonsky reports that the “Elizabeth Murray Praise Day” at the Bowery Poetry Club, sponsored by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, “provided a […]
On Sunday, at her home in upstate New York, Elizabeth Murray died of complications from lung cancer. She was duly renowned as a passionate, energetic, […]
According to Spiegel Online International, German painter Jrg Immendorff passed away today from complications related to a neurodegenerative disorder. He was among Germany’s most influential […]
