ARTnews
Jack Tworkov on Chaim Soutine
ARTnews
Blog post revisiting Jack Tworkov’s 1950 essay “The Wandering Soutine.” Chaim Soutine: Flesh is on view at the Jewish Museum, New York through September 16, 2018. Tworkov writes: “Soutine derives an immediate advantage by painting from life; because his motive is settled in advance, he does not have to tease it out in the process of painting. […]
Laura Owens: The Sky Is the Limit
ARTnews
Phyllis Tuchman reviews a mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Tuchman writes that Owen’s recent abstract works “are bold, handsome works that exemplify how a new wave of artists is approaching the making of abstract paintings. Instead of appropriating, say, […]
Leland Bell on André Derain
ARTnews
Blog post re-publishing Leland Bell’s seminal 1960 artice The Case for Derain as An Immortal. Bell writes: “The wholeness of [Derain’s] art is a response to the wholeness of nature. His art does not separate life into compartments: instinct here, intellect there. He didn’t paint with half of himself… Derain senses the virtue of … […]
Patricia Treib: Interstices
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Ella Coon reviews Patricia Treib: Interstices recently on view at Bureau, New York. Coon writes: “Treib’s engagement with ciphers and symbols coupled with her treatment of the canvas as uncharted territory—something to be delicately partitioned or meted out—suggests she is interested in something more than abstracting reality—that is, reducing observable objects and scenes to aestheticized […]
Giacometti, Frontality and Cubism
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Blog post revisiting Jonathan Silver’s 1974 article Giacometti, Frontality and Cubism. Silver writes: “I believe a fresh approach to Giacometti’s figurative style will show that its apparent reductiveness—the insistence on frontality, the prevailing monochrome of the paintings and the attenuation of the sculptured figures—represents the common ground between contending aims and mutually limiting conditions in […]
Matisse in the Studio
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Phyllis Tuchman reviews Matisse in the Studio at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on view through July 9, 2017. Tuchman writes: “Though he closely observed his subjects, [Matisse] generally rendered them with a twist depending on his interests of the moment. Has any other show in recent times made us so acutely aware of […]
Philip Guston @ the Gallerie dell’Accademia
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Sarah Douglas reviews Philip Guston and The Poets at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, on view through September 3, 2017. Douglas writes that “the show, curated by Guston scholar Kosme de Baranano, is built–somewhat loosely–around Guston’s reading of and relationships with poets. There are the whimsical works on paper he made to illustrate his wife Musa […]
Julian Stanczak (1928 – 2017)
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Alex Greenberger remembers painter Julian Stanczak (1928 – 2017) who passed away March 25. Greenberger writes: “Stanczak’s acrylic paintings often tended toward brightly colored shapes and grids. Typically made through contrasting unlike hues, Stanczak was able to create compositions that are jarring to the eye. They highlight the act of seeing, in the process showing […]
Elise Ansel: Dialogue
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Alfred Mac Adam reviews the recent exhibition Elise Ansel: Dialogue at Danese/Corey Gallery, New York. Mac Adam writes: “Ansel investigates the ‘dialogues’ her paintings establish with the great masters … We can identify three moments in the gestation of Ansel’s version: first, her contemplation of the original in one form or another (in person, in […]
Seurat’s Circus Sideshow @ the Met
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Phyllis Tuchman reviews Seurat’s Circus Sideshow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through May 29, 2017. Tuchman writes: “As in his other major works, Seurat was portraying an actual place in Circus Sideshow (Parade de Cirque)… A sequence of nine gas lamps perched above the temporary stage illuminates the scene; another […]
An Embarrassment of Riches: The Shchukin Collection
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Maika Pollack reviews Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection at The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, on view through March 5, 2017. Pollack writes: “A single room in which 13 vast Matisse paintings hang is the highlight of the exhibition. These are only a fraction of Shchukin’s 43 Matisses, but each is a knockout: In […]
Aubrey Levinthal’s Refrigerator Paintings
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Ella Coon reviews Aubrey Levinthal: Refrigerator Paintings, recently on view at The Painting Center, New York. Coon writes: “The paintings’ quotidian content, fragmented imagery, and color choices make the pieces feel both elusive and earthy. When looking at the works together in the tiny space, the viewer is reminded of not only the bodily activity […]
Adrian Ghenie: Every Painting Is Abstract
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Andy Battaglia profiles painter Adrian Ghenie whose recent paintings are on view at Pace Gallery, New York through February 18, 2017. Battaglia notes: “Compositions can be figurative, [Ghenie] said, but the power of painting—when it has any power at all—is less in the cause than in the effect. And that effect is abstract regardless of the […]
Marjorie Welish: Some Differences
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Barbara A. MacAdam reviews Marjorie Welish: Some Differences at Art 3, New York, on view through February 5, 2017. MacAdam writes: “What is most surprising in this gathering is the personal, physical quality of the works. They seem to mimic breathing, inhaling and exhaling between the vacant areas and the more expansive blue mounds. Sometimes there’s a […]
Mark Rothko: Dark Palette
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Alfred Mac Adam reviews the recent exhibition Mark Rothko: Dark Palette at Pace Gallery, New York Mac Adam observes: “The act of superimposing black on color ironically transforms the surface into a mirror that enables viewers to seek and lose themselves in the work. The paintings invite speculation, and speculation generates dynamic narrative, going “on […]
Matisse/Diebenkorn in Baltimore
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Phyllis Tuchman reviews Matisse/Diebenkorn at the Baltimore Museum of Art, on view through January 29, 2017. Tuchman asserts: “Astonishingly, Diebenkorn’s paintings in Baltimore are never overshadowed, as you might expect, by Matisse’s masterpieces. The American … doesn’t just hold his own: he actually upstages Matisse… Like Matisse, he’s become the type of artist we expect to […]
Philip Pearlstein on Francis Picabia
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Blog post revisiting Philip Pearlstein’s 1970 essay on Francis Picabia on the occasion of the exhibition Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction at MoMA, New York, on view from November 21, 2016 – March 19, 2017. Pearlstein writes: “The effort to try to understand the recent past was so […]
Susan Rothenberg @ Sperone Westwater
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Andrew Russeth talks to painter Susan Rothenberg about the works in her show at Sperone Westwater, New York, on view through December 20, 2016. Russeth writes that Rothenberg’s new paintings “are focused and tough—stunning, in a word. One shows a ferocious-looking raven with pale pink feathers against what one might call a classic Rothenberg background—patchy […]
Richard Pousette-Dart: Transcendental Expressionist
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Blog post revisiting Jack Kroll’s April 1961 profile of painter Richard Pousette-Dart, republished on the occasion of the exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart: The Centennial at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through October 15, 2016. Kroll writes: “The art of Richard Pousette-Dart seems very much in the line of American “home-made” eidolonian transcendentalism. He is a […]
Ad Reinhardt: Twelve Rules for a New Academy
ARTnews
Ad Reinhardt’s Twelve Rules for a New Academy is the latest post in the ARTNews “Retrospectives” column. Alex Greenberger introduces the text writing: “Much of today’s discussion of contemporary abstraction is centered on ‘Zombie Formalism’—Walter Robinson’s coinage for new work that revisits (or apes, one might say) historical forms of abstraction for purely stylistic reasons. […]