The exhibition “Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is not about guitars, violins, bottles or cups, the subjects of the 65 drawings, collages, constructions, paintings and photographs on view. It’s about what is possible in a studio when everything clicks. Entering the show, organized by Anne Umland with Blair Hartzell, you find Read More
Fifth Avenue always connotes money, but stories of fortunes lost are now in the air, and as if on cue Rembrandt is on at the Frick. In fact the New York Rembrandt is there, Self-Portrait (1658), the largest of his signature self-portraits, painted two years after his infamous bankruptcy, returned home to the mansion’s Oval Read More
One of the many enjoyable things about some of Paul Cézanne’s paintings is that they seem unfinished. They are manifestly slowly made, yet patches of bare canvas show through oil paint; the painted backgrounds don’t quite meet the edge of the frame. Two series, the card players and the smokers, are the focus of a Read More
It’s easy to dislike George Condo. His exhibition at the New Museum was ushered in with a profile in The New Yorker replete with anecdotes about how he met his beautiful wife in a nightclub; his Upper East Side townhouses; his tastes for expensive wine and gambling; and his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Mr. Condo was part Read More
Edward Hopper is the quintessential painter of American loneliness. Would Hopper’s characters ever have Facebook pages? What if they were checking their Twitter feed in the night cafe? Of course, it is absurd to ask these questions. His subjects seem not just like people naturally inclined to isolation but as though they were operating during Read More
