An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 9, 2026
Contributed by Margaret McCann / Ben Shahn’s lifelong advocacy against poverty, racism, and fascism is showcased in his solo exhibition “Ben Shahn and Nonconformity,” now up at the Jewish Museum. With engaging documentation, an array of global topics are addressed in printmaking, photography, commercial art, and calligraphy – and some excellent paintings.
Contributed by Lucas Moran / On Instagram, where most artists list their websites, exhibitions, and accomplishments beneath their handles, Dan Schein keeps it simple: “artist/painter,” followed by “Person Who Stutters.” It’s fitting for a painter whose work, some now on display at JJ Murphy Gallery, feels as though it may sometimes have a tough time coming out of him. But Schein, a painter’s painter, knows how to elicit beauty from struggle….
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The phenomenon of the selfie, an artifact of the smart phone, is a supreme irony. The act itself suggests a narcissistic preoccupation with recording one’s presence, but its frequency and ubiquity indicates that it doesn’t matter much what person or place gets that honor. Warhol’s fleeting fifteen minutes is compressed into a pandering fraction of a second. I was here; please care. The only auto-photographers who really seem to get durably noticed are the Darwin Award winners whose acrobatic exertions towards drama topple them into the lethal maw of treacherous vistas. Lost in the scree of evanescent look-at-me images is the self in full social and political context, and it’s not in plain sight. There are few painters better suited for excavating it than David Humphrey, as he demonstrates in “porTraits,” his formidable solo exhibition now up at Fredericks & Freiser. Humphrey’s crowning gift – born of comprehensive technical and aesthetic command, a uniquely graphic allusive approach, sardonic wit, and an irrepressible narrative impulse – is to coordinate the nuances of disparate visual elements so finely as to render the busiest of paintings piercingly, disturbingly coherent.
Alice Neel, �Degenerate Madonna,� (1930), Oil on canvas. 31 � 24 inches. � The Estate of Alice Neel, courtesy David Zwirner, New York. Although there […]
David Zwirner has two concurrent exhibitions of Alice Neel�s work, “Alice Neel: Selected Works” at the Chelsea branch, and “Alice Neel: Nudes of the 1930s” […]
In the NYTimes, Martha Schwendener reports: “The show at the Parrish, ‘All the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy,’ stems from discussions between Mr. […]
“Alice Neel,” directed and written by Andrew Neel. Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Various dates through Oct. 7. In […]
