(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

You would think that, with 69 Cezannes in its permanent collection, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia might feel it had enough Cezanne, but no—it seems to feel that it can never get enough.

Since I feel the same way, I beat feet to Philadelphia to see the Barnes’s latest special exhibition,  Read More 

Pomonians tend to have short artistic memories. Or so, at least, is the conclusion I've come to from seeing how august museums like the Met, the Frick and the Morgan seem to feel that to attract younger museum-goers, they must augment their invaluable holdings in older art with all the latest buzz (no matter how feeble). Modernists, on the other hand,  Read More 

Way back in February, I went to the media preview of “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through September 1).

This is the kind of show that I normally applaud: a lavish, clearly expensive, multimedia extravaganza of a major modern movement, with more than 360 works by more than 80 artists, architects, designers, photographers, and writers, borrowed from all over the civilized world.  Read More 

There was a time when the Manhattan art world was much smaller, and one movement could sweep across a large segment of it (though never commanding its entirety).

An example of this was the switch from painterly abstract expressionism to what Clement Greenberg called “post-painterly abstraction.” Though it received only a fraction of the publicity accorded pop, it was the guiding principle in  Read More 

As I said in my last post, I remember James Wolfe (b. 1944) from the late 80s, when his sculptures were exhibited at André Emmerich. In 1990, when I was preparing to go out to teach at Bethany College in West Virginia, George Hofmann sent me a copy of Sculpture magazine with an article in it  Read More