An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, December 19, 2025
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / I didn’t expect to particularly like MoMA’s Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, but merely to learn from it. Turns out I loved all fourteen essays – each by a contemporary female writer, and each about a woman who worked at or for MoMA during the first decades after its founding in 1929. Many are beautifully written. While all are about formidable, pathbreaking women, none are hagiographic.
Contributed by Adam Simon / One could be forgiven for mistaking the paintings of David Rhodes at High Noon Gallery for samples of high-end décor, with black fabric punctuated by parallel diagonal stripes stretched over variously sized frames. Whether or not Rhodes anticipates that his work might elicit this response, for me it provided a hurdle, a momentary deflection, suspending my usual mode of engaging with art. I’m glad I had this moment of puzzlement, wondering what in fact I was looking at, before the significance of Rhodes’ achievement sank in.
“Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh�s Letters to �mile Bernard,” Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY. through Jan. 6. To complement the letters, more […]
