Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Some artists�go upstate to get away from the art world in the summer, and others gather an�art […]
Tag: Jonathan Stevenson
Art and Film: Ghost as witness
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / George Eliot said, wisely, that our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them. For the great […]
Art and Film: Not so simple folk (art)
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / According to Aisling Walsh�s irrepressibly winning Maudie (2016), Maud Dowley, plagued by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, was through no fault of […]
Art and Film: The life and death of a cinephilic boomtown
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A somewhat film-nerdy set of historical facts gave rise to found-footage maven Bill Morrison�s extraordinarily artful and expansive documentary Dawson […]
Art and Film: Wajda�s final word on art and politics
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson /�Wladyslaw Strzeminski, the reluctant hero of Afterimage, the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda�s last film before his death at age 90 […]
Art and Film: Stefan Zweig and the artist�s abdication
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If poet Pablo Neruda weaponized his talent and his plight to stand against authoritarian forces in his native Chile and […]
Raymond Pettibon: Long may he buzz
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It would be easy to cast the tireless, unconstrained Raymond Pettibon as the louche trickster demigod of wise-ass artist-snipers. But […]
A better bonfire at the Whitney: Painting from the 1980s
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s,” the Whitney’s trenchant exhibition of American work, immediately recalls the Reagan era, when bluffness […]
Virtuosity: David Humphrey at Fredericks & Freiser
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / David Humphrey’s visual and intellectual virtuosity — augmented by the smooth surface finality of meticulously applied acrylic paint — is such that he seems to accomplish everything he wants in a given painting. Each one in his current exhibition “I’m Glad We Had This Conversation,” at Fredericks & Freiser, stands as a cohesive essay — establishing a theme, teasing it out, and offering a witty take. If that sounds too neat and squared away for a mode of expression that is supposed to register some mystery and wonder, it is’t. There is constructive enigma in Humphrey’s purposeful, highly-wrought approach.
Art and Film: Elizabeth Murray and the splendor of the ordinary
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Elizabeth Murray, who died too young at 66 in 2007, stretched and contorted household scenes and objects into kinetic abstract […]
Art and Film: Pablo Neruda and the triumph of art
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / With Donald Trump�s victory in the presidential election, the principled advancement of civilization as the goal of politics seemed to […]
Art and Film: Damien Chazelle comes of age in La La Land
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson /�Whiplash, Damien Chazelle�s remarkably assured and incendiary second feature from 2014, made the case that artistic accomplishment was predominantly a cloistered […]
Godward and upward at SLAG
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Ben Godward is at home with bright colors and exotic shapes. The New York sculptor has for some time been […]
Artists under duress: Max Beckmann
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Esteemed in Germany during the Weimar Republic but branded a “degenerate artist” by the anti-modern Adolf Hitler, the great expressionist […]
Art and Film: Kelly Reichardt�s stoic women
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Kelly Reichardt�s unostentatiously virtuosic Certain Women, based on Maile Meloy�s short stories, depicts hardscrabble Montana in angular austerity, with the […]
