Museum conservationists are breathless about a hot new method of preserving art! It’s called anoxic, or oxygen-free, storage and a recent five-year study at the Tate Modern has shown it to be surprisingly effective in slowing the deterioration of works of art. Read More
The relationship between photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, one of American Modernism’s greatest cheerleaders, and painter Georgia O’Keeffe, one of America’s greatest Modernist painters, is one of the great love stories of our time, one that was — well, at least for this reader — demystified a bit by the revelations in Deborah Solomon’s Read More
There are artists who, despite their abundant gifts, seem destined to endure a melancholy fate, and one of them was Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938), the subject of a fine exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bluemner was too “advanced” for the traditionalists at a time when modernism was still a contentious issue, and he Read More
The current exhibition at the Richard York Gallery, John Marin and Paul Strand: Friends in New England , is said by its organizers to constitute a “dialogue” between these legendary Yankee modernists. Yet despite their long friendship (both lived into their 80′s) and their common debt to Alfred Stieglitz, who launched both of their careers Read More
Of the many things to be said about the extraordinary exhibition called Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries , which Sarah Greenough has organized at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the first is this: It not only illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of American modernism on Read More
Time has not been kind to the reputation of the American photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973), whose work is now the subject of a very problematic exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Although he was twice a power in the primary venues that advanced photography as a fine art in this country–first as Alfred Read More
While no single art exhibition could be expected to bring us the pleasures of Paris in the spring, a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 , might just be the next best thing. Particularly this spring, with the Sensation -type novelties of the Whitney Biennial about to open Read More
How good was Georgia O’Keeffe? As a painter, I mean.
As a personality O’Keeffe was, by all accounts, extraordinary. She certainly had little trouble captivating the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, who was not an easy mark-though he did, to be sure, have a thing about women much younger than himself. But as an artist? How Read More
“Americans are supposed to paint as if they had never seen another picture.” That disheartening observation was made in a moment of exasperation and despair by the American painter Arthur Dove (1880-1946) sometime in the 1930′s-a decade that was not an easy period for an artist of his persuasion.
By the mid-1930′s, Dove had for Read More
