A newsletter of art criticism, art comment & occasional political comment. Estab. 1996. Published in hard copy 5-7 times a year. (For new shows, see "events;" for hard-copy rates, see "works.")
Peter G. Ray. "The Garden of Earthly Delights" 2013. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72" x 102".
Three worthwhile gallery shows I’ve seen recently present art from three times & places. The earliest takes us back to the 1920s in Paris. The latest presents art as it is now, in exurban New York and Canada. The middle focuses on a painter who worked during the five decades in between, all the way from Florida to New Hampshire. (more…)
David d'Angers (1788-1856). La Douleur, 1811. Plaster. 21 1/4 x 12 5/8 x 10 1/4 inches (54 x 32 x 26 cm). Collection Roberta J. M. Olson and Alexander B.V. Johnson
The Frick Collection this fall has two stellar exhibitions on view. One has fifteen magnificent 17th century Dutch Old Masters, visiting from Holland. The other is a mini-retrospective of David d’Angers, who in the early 19th century would become one of France’s first Romantic sculptors. Both shows are well worth seeing. (more…)
Nobody could recreate the 1913 Armory Show as it originally existed, with approximately 1300 works of art by over 300 European and American artists. Two museums have recently tried to stage an evocation of it, in honor of its centenary, and although I liked the first show a lot, I like the second even better.
William Perehudoff (1918-2013) AC-87-023, 1987 Acrylic on canvas 55 x 114 inches Courtesy BERRY CAMPBELL, New York
Chelsea is still a place where younger artists & audience go to see and be seen, but it is also getting to be awfully chic. It never really was a low-end platform, even when it first took over the leadership of the downtown art scene from SoHo, but now this is more evident than ever, (more…)
Anthony Caro. Red Splash, 1966. Steel, painted. 45 1/2" x 69" x 41". Collection Mr. and Mrs. David Mirvish, .Toronto. Photograph (c) Barford Sculptures, photographer John Riddy.
So—Sir Anthony Caro is gone. At least it was quick and painless (we should all be so lucky). And he was 89: it was the end of a long, rich and full life. I first met him in late 1969, about three months after I'd left Time. I'd decided to leave New York, go to London, and (more…)
One show I wanted to see—and was not disappointed by—was “Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York,” at the New-York Historical Society (closed, alas, September 1—I wish I’d gotten to it earlier, so I could have posted this review when the show was still open, and my readers would have been able to go see it).
As organized by Barbara Haskell of the Whitney and independent curator Sasha Nicholas, (more…)
Julia Margaret Cameron(English, 1815-1879). Sir John Herschel. April 1867. Albumen silver print from glass negative. The Rubel Collection, Promised Gift of William Rubel. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (L 1997.84.6)
Upon learning from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that they were putting on “Julia Margaret Cameron,” I rushed to get there. I hoped that they would do a better job with this gifted portrait photographer (1815-1879) than MoMA did, when they staged “Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women,” back in 1999. (more…)
A second show I saw at MoMA (after I took in Walker Evans) was one I expected nothing much from, and that was about what I got. It’s a bargain show at the Museum of Modern Art, almost completely culled from its permanent collection, and evidently designed to appeal to late summer tourists, but also provide grist for revanchist big-city pomonians. (more…)
Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975). Citizen in Downtown Havana. 1932. Gelatin silver print. 9 3/8 x 5 1/16″ (23.8 x 12.9 cm). Lily Auchincloss Fund. Credit: The Museum of Modern Art.
For some reason, I seem to be wallowing in representational art this summer & autumn. But representational isn’t necessarily bad – just as abstraction isn’t necessarily good. In this case, we have two story-telling artists, and although narratives can be boring, I found these two with something to say. (more…)
Marc Chagall, Solitude, 1933. Oil on canvas, 44 x 66 in. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, gift of the artist 1953, (c)2013 /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New Y ork/ADAGP, Paris.
Once again, I present my list of the more noteworthy coming attractions this fall. Three of them have already opened, but I’ve only been to one of those three (and as a result include a review of it at the end of this listing). The two biggest museums in town are, in their main exhibits, sitting back on their academic haunches this year, but some of the city’s smaller museums are nobly stepping into the breach (to mix my metaphors). Plus even the occasional gallery. (more…)
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