The Women of Giacometti, an array of paintings and sculpture by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) on display at Pace Wildenstein, prompts a kind of yearning that has become familiar at the 57th Street branch of the gallery. Past shows bringing together Bonnard and Rothko, de Kooning and Dubuffet, Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt, Read More
Facility, which in painting is usually taken to mean both ease of expression and a mastery of the medium, is commonly regarded as an enviable gift, yet it can also have a downside. In certain cases (think of Boldini, Sargent, the Swedish painter Anders Zorn and—at a lower level—Andy Warhol), facility of execution is seen Read More
It was to be expected that, when the Morgan Library got around to mounting its first exhibitions of 20th-century art, they would be nothing less than a connoisseur’s delight. After all, a high and unhurried standard of connoisseurship has long been one of the hallmarks of the Morgan’s exhibition and acquisitions programs, and this is Read More
For aficionados of modern sculpture, it’s a stroke of good
fortune that the traveling exhibition devoted to the early work of the American
sculptor David Smith (1906-65) has come to New York-the
final stop on its national tour-at a moment when the Alberto Giacometti
retrospective (at the Museum of Modern Art) and the Henry Moore Read More
The big retrospective devoted to Henry Moore (1898-1986), which
has now come to the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
would be a capital event at almost any time. Yet this splendid exhibition is
especially compelling just now for anyone who comes to it from a recent visit
to the retrospective devoted to Alberto Giacometti Read More
Blessed are the artists who, owing to family history, innate talent and an indomitable will, are born to their vocation. What a lot of false starts, wasted energy and deferred achievement they are spared! They come to art as a natural inheritance, and they come to it early, without the Sturm und Drang so often Read More
In the summer of 1949, a 22-year-old graduate student from the University of Chicago arrived in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Sorbonne. His name was Herbert Lust, a self-described “farm boy from Indiana” who had been orphaned at the age of nine. “I was at that time among the top scholars Read More
