If Bill Jensen weren’t capable of making such awful paintings, his good ones wouldn’t be worth taking so seriously. His improvisatory method is inherently hit-or-miss. His scraped and scarred canvases often fail to distinguish between the grace note and the heavy hand.
Case in point: the forbiddingly dark canvases in the introductory gallery of Cheim Read More
One sign that Arthur Dove: Watercolors, on display at Alexandre Gallery, is a museum-quality exhibition is the fact that the curators have included artifacts: In a pair of vitrines containing objects from the artist’s studio are tubes of paint, jars filled with pigment, brushes, oil-stained pages from an old treatise on color and even Crayola Read More
I’m mad at the Met. Sure, it’s one of the world’s great museums. Tourists flock to its treasures, and New Yorkers, though perhaps a bit blasé about an institution in their backyard, nonetheless know it’s a marker of the city’s cultural significance. And it’s true that in recent years, guided by director Philippe de Montebello, Read More
I’m mad at the Met. Sure, it’s one of the world’s great museums. Tourists flock to its treasures, and New Yorkers, though perhaps a bit blasé about an institution in their backyard, nonetheless know it’s a marker of the city’s cultural significance. And it’s true that in recent years, guided by director Philippe de Montebello, Read More
I wasn’t eager to visit the exhibition of paintings by Andrew Spence currently on display at the Edward Thorp Gallery: I doubted he had anything fresh to show me. Mr. Spence’s emblematic semi-abstractions-distillations of observed phenomena keyed to a hard, bright palette and characterized by densely worked surfaces-have been a reliable fixture on the art Read More
To mark its last 25 years, the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries has mounted an extraordinary exhibition of modern American painting and sculpture drawn mainly from the first four decades of the century. Among the earliest works in the show are the Fauvist Still Life (circa 1907) by Alfred Maurer; a bronze sculpture, Standing Male Nude (1908-9), by Read More
That artists often despise critics (except, of course, the critics who praise them) is an old story. Yet it is a rarity for artists to strike back by ridiculing their critics in a painting or sculpture or some other work of art. It is not entirely unknown, however. In this century, Arthur C. Dove’s The 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
