Link to Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/arts/design/american-legends-calder-to-okeeffe-at-whitney-museum.html
Roberta Smith reviews the exhibition American Legends: Calder to O’Keeffe at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, on view through May 2013.
Smith writes: "By chance 'Legends' coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s sweeping survey 'Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925,' which traces the development of a largely geometric form of abstraction, mostly by European and Russian artists who often worked in closely related styles. In comparison the Whitney’s display might almost have been subtitled 'Inventing American Modernism, One Sensibility at a Time.' The artists here impress you as talented loners working toward diverse and much messier notions of modernity. To be sure, they take tips from European styles, but they also free themselves from such influences with highly personal responses to the sights and subjects specific to this country — the rawness of its landscapes, the tawdriness of its cities, as well as its folk art, social mores and racism. Sometimes they are working toward abstraction, sometimes not."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2012/08/at-wadsworth-atheneum-american-clarity.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about American paintings in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.
Sultan writes: "There is a strain in American painting that takes its essential character from the primitive, from a desire to grasp hold of things, to make them present and tangible. It's a reality that goes beyond the visual to the tactile... [I] was riveted by the colonial era artist John Durand's portrait. The color harmonies were beautiful, but it was the clarity of form that particularly interested me."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.yankeemagazine.com/art-reviews/hartley-in-dogtown/
Ed Beem blogs about the exhibition Marsden Hartley: Soliloquy in Dogtown at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts, on view through October 14, 2012.
Beem writes: "Regarded as the province of vagabonds, prostitutes, witches and feral dogs, Dogtown is just the sort of place that fires the artist's imagination... Hartley's interpretation of Dogtown runs toward the Expressionist take on regionalism that defined his later work, the heaviness of both the Expressionist style and palette and of the Dogtown erratics worked out in bold, black outline. His drawings sketch the scruffy contours of the twisted and torqued landscape with particular attention to local landmarks such as the Whale's Jaw, a split pair of boulders that resemble the maw of a leviathan."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.yankeemagazine.com/art-reviews/modernist-art/
Ed Beem reviews two concurrent painting exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine: Maine Moderns: Art in Sequinland, 1900-1940 on view through September 11 and John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury on view through October 10.
Maine Moderns: Art in Sequinland highlights the importance of Maine in the development of American Modernism. Beem notes that the "Modernists who passed through Seguinland include Max Weber, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Gaston Lachaise, and perhaps most importantly for the history of Maine art, Marguerite and William Zorach."
The Marin exhibition "focus[es] on his late work, paintings in which he translated the dynamic natural forces of Maine's bold coast into increasingly abstract compositions inspired by wind and water, waves, and sunlight."
