Search Results for "label/New York Magazine"

Solo Shows

Diebenkorn at Gagosian: A remarkable curatorial accomplishment 

Contributed by David Carrier / For a long time, I have always thought of Richard Diebenkorn as a great painter. A couple of his paintings were in my local museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where I treasured seeing them. But he was, so I believed, someone whose development was straightforward, even a little boring. I arrived at Gagosian’s large upstairs gallery on Madison Avenue with low expectations of a thick array of Diebenkorns in that one room. Maybe it had been a mistake, inspired by misguided nostalgia, to take on this assignment. In the event, the exhibition was revelatory, holding me spellbound. This is one reason why I love being an art critic – the surprise.

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Museum Exhibitions

The new Frick: A somewhat sentimental reaction

Contributed by David Carrier / Rebuilding seems to be a cyclical occurrence for older art museums. The collection expands, styles of display change, more capacious restaurants and shops may be needed. Older museums have to construct new galleries. To the original European galleries, entered atop the stairs at the entrance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art added space for Islamic art, contemporary work, and Asian paintings. Alternatively, a wealthy museum can rebuild almost from scratch, as MoMA has repeatedly done. Yet, for most of the time I have been going to art museums, New York’s Frick Collection has been basically unchanged, an island of stability. I remember once being shocked that one of its masterworks – Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider – was away on loan. No other major New York art institution has remained basically the same over such a lengthy period, celebrating idiosyncratic displays that mix sacred and secular works in a luxurious setting. Henry Clay Frick had a great eye. 

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Museum Exhibitions

Jo Baer: Space, position, and light

Contributed by David Carrier / Five smallish early Jo Baer paintings are on display in one white- walled gallery at DIA Beacon in her exhibition there since 2022. The show is both tantalizing and exasperating. In the 1970s, Baer became famous as a minimalist painter. Then she left New York, published a manifesto in 1983 proclaiming “I am no longer an abstract artist,” and changed her style completely.

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Solo Shows

Beatrice Caracciolo: Exquisitely stealthy

Contributed by David Carrier / What does it mean for a contemporary artist to be inspired by an older text or artwork? The Gospel of Matthew 15:14 says: “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Moved by those words in 1568, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Blind Leading the Blind, which hangs in Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Now stirred by that picture, Beatrice Caracciolo, a young artist who grew up in that city, has drawn The Blind 16: one large image of the blind beggars and several smaller details also derived from the Bruegel. Between Matthew and Bruegel and then Bruegel and Caracciolo, there’s a kind of creative slippage whereby the meaning of the prior statement is transformed. At each stage, Matthew’s basic conception is partly preserved while something is added or subtracted. He doesn’t specify, for instance, that there are six blind men. Caracciolo shows his entire work, but without color, in grisaille. In smaller rectangular works on paper, she focuses on the trees and on some of the individual blind men.

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