Contributed by David Carrier / “Miró and the United States,” now up at The Phillips Collection, offers a useful take on an important, much-discussed issue: the origins of Abstract Expressionism. Joan Miró (1893–1983) taught many Americans how to make a successful abstract painting. Between the First and Second World Wars, when American artists were finding themselves, Miró’s work was a welcome and beneficial influence. The Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso and Matisse’s works from the early twentieth-century may have been greater. But, like Kandinsky, Miró provided…
Tag: Normal Lewis
“Project A Black Planet” – Enshrining a promised land
Contributed by David Carrier / Few human developments have been more consequential, in terms of both art history and broader cultural expansion, than the movement of Africans within and out of their own continent. The mammoth exhibition “Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” now at the Art Institute of Chicago in twelve high-ceilinged contemporary galleries, includes more than 350 drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, watercolors and prints, but also books, magazines, posters, and record albums, made from the 1920s onward. It’s a lot, but never too much.




















