Alan Riding looks at the artist chosen for the innaugural solo show at the Grand Palais in Paris. “Since moving to France in 1993, this German-born artist has turned his 50-acre property in Provence into a sprawling installation, with a former silk factory serving as his studio, and warehouses, greenhouses, […]
Solo Shows
Frida Kahlo centennial exhibition to premiere at Walker Art Center
Curated by Kahlo biographer and art historian Hayden Herrera and Walker associate curator Elizabeth Carpenter, the presentation will include approximately 50 paintings from the beginning of Kahlos career in 1926 to the year of her death in 1954. Following its showing at the Walker, Frida Kahlo will travel to Philadelphia […]
The “touchingly strange” paintings of Georges Rouault
Michael Kimmelman reviews the Rouault exhibition in today’s NYTimes. “At one time Rouaults reputation rivaled Matisses, and his clowns and prostitutes were as ubiquitously reproduced as Ben Shahn posters. He had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 and 1953; when he died in 1958, at 87, the […]
The superslick, super-flat, superexpensive paintings of Takashi Murakami
Jerry Saltz reviews the show in New York Magazine. “The main attractions of this exhibition are 50 little happy-faced flower paintings and six large portraits of a haggard-looking Zen patriarch. The flowers are insipid. So are the portraits, although at least with them Murakami is up to his old extreme […]
The inscrutable Sigmar Polke
In today’s NYTimes, Carol Vogel visits Polke in his Cologne studio before he ships his paintings to the Venice Biennale. As is always the case with his work, Mr. Polke said, the paintings for the biennale sprang from specific ideas yet evolved in mystical ways as he experimented. “This is […]
Roberta Smith looks at German paintings made with a wink and a sneer. “Painting may go in and out of fashion, but its many lifesaving graces always keep it afloat. One is its capacity for what might be called beautiful sarcasm, a sly self-parody while still looking good that is […]
Art Forum critics’ picks for the month
George Baselitz in New YorkChristopher Wool in Berlin
David Godbold’s mirthless mirth
Ben Davis dissects David Godbold’s snarky exhibition in artnet today. “Contemporary art is universally irreverent, but most often none too funny. This observation is particularly striking when one considers the fact that a lot of it, particularly that inspired by Big Daddy Marcel Duchamp, owes its very being to the […]
Edward Hopper’s Feng Shui
Peter Schjeldahl reviews the Edward Hopper retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when […]
Michael Kimmelman NYT review of Myron Stout
Art Reveiw The canvas, Stout wrote, came not from any remembered form of flowers or flower beds but from a tree outside the door, a tree that the thin foliage of the lower reaches allowed the rising branches to be seen, rising, yet moving sideways, toward each other. His small, […]
