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 […]
Solo Shows
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, […]
The accumulated weight of experience
Richard Rhodes on the new abstraction: “Painting has regained its relevancesocially and professionally. It has re-established a life for images beyond photography and the mass media. It stands as an alternative to conceptualist artmaking. Once buried by art theory, it has returned to reconnect with centuries of art and to […]
Ellsworth Kelly rocks at the Tate Modern
In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones wonders why gallery goers aren’t blown away. “If Kelly makes you see the sheer beauty of minimalism – as opposed to the ready-made conceptualism it is so often seen as a dumb vessel of – he also connects contemporary, living art with the heritage of […]
