Given that the Museum of Modern Art has undergone a makeover and become rather indistinguishable from an amusement park, it may come as a shock that the current exhibition devoted to the Bauhaus will have none of that. Not at all a spectacle, with little deluxe glamour evident in the art objects or their installation, Read More
Certain situations make us aware of arithmetic eloquence. Two exhibitions, paying homage to series, do just that.
Dan Flavin’s sculptural installation is a surprise even for those viewers who know his work well, for to enter the galleries at David Zwirner is to be blown back by near blinding color-drenched light. Induced to see Read More
Who among us has not envisioned a better world and imagined ways to transform the troubled here and now to a new and radiant day? William Blake (1757-1827), an artist and poet of uniquely configured creative talent, put his eye, heart and soul on the line with each attempt to transform the world on behalf Read More
The New York School has done more than provide the art world with blue-chip art; its gestural aesthetics continue to sustain considerations of what painting is and what it isn’t when, as now is the case, a few exhibitions revisit the era, or restage works, or react to its significant paradigm.
A test of Read More
The imperative of visionary logic goes like this: if the worldliness of the present world be false, then divest yourself of it, and precipitate a future that rings true. Russian-born Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) remains one of a few artists whose art is definitive in this sense, and so it is a major event when, as Read More
For getting a grip on the New York School and what became of it, go see the exhibition of David Novros’ compelling paintings from the ’60s, now in its last week at the Paula Cooper Gallery; his early paintings prove indispensable to understanding the reception of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.
“Getting a grip” Read More
Sent to the resettlement camp at Papunya, in South Central Australia, to acculturate the Aboriginal children, schoolteacher Geoff Bardon noticed that they were drawing nonstop in the sand, and encouraged them to do this art as a mural rather than to draw the cowboys and Indians they were supposed to draw. On seeing their culture Read More
Why forgo fine art? Why do things that degrade and disappear? Why write? These are some of the questions provoked by “In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976,” a show of ephemera, selected from the archives of the experimental space Art & Project, now installed at the Museum of Modern Art through Read More
The clear glass pavilions of Dan Graham would seem the opposite of Richard Serra’s winding, high-walled steel corridors: the pavilions open, the corridors pressing in. But they have much in common. This thought will help orient the viewer tempted to see the retrospective “Dan Graham: Beyond,” now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as Read More
Before they became entertainment centers, museums were meant to be encyclopedias of cultural heritage where objects were kept in the public trust.
It is in this spirit that the Brooklyn Museum’s reinstallation of its Islamic art collection puts on view an exhibition within an exhibition: the small, pitch-perfect “Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Read More
