In 1969, the artist Bruce Nauman made Pacing Upside Down, a 56-minute single-frame film of the artist crazily astride his California studio: a portrait of the artist as a convict in his cage. It was an extreme act of art that became foundational—inaugurating a shift in style from American abstract painting and Pop to post-Minimalism, Read More
You know something’s wrong when a work of art appeals solely on a prurient basis.
In Body Collage (1967), a performance captured on 16-millimeter film, the artist Carolee Schneeman smears a milky liquid over her naked body and proceeds to roll around in a pile of torn paper scattered on the floor of an industrial Read More
The American painter Arnold Friedman (1874-1946) once groused about the “cadging—pettifogging [and] lickspittling” typical of the art scene of his day. Some verities are eternal.
Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to the Read More
The American painter Arnold Friedman (1874-1946) once groused about the “cadging—pettifogging [and] lickspittling” typical of the art scene of his day. Some verities are eternal.
Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to Read More
It was the 19th-century British critic William Hazlitt who shrewdly observed that writers “who lack delicacy hold us in their power”; the same might be said of certain painters. One of them is the American artist Jules Olitski (b. 1922), whose paintings are currently the subject of an exhibition at Knoedler & Company. “Boisterous, daring Read More
Just under half a century has passed since the young Mark di Suvero (born 1933) made his debut with an exhibition of sculpture that met with instant astonishment and acclaim. Sheer scale would have been enough to cause astonishment-the tallest sculpture was over eight feet high-but size was by no means the principal appeal of Read More
Artists who think big and don’t hesitate to let the world know about their ambitions are often a trial to their contemporaries and a conundrum to posterity. The demands they make on their own gifts are so exorbitant that it’s difficult-for them as well as for us-to know when (or if) they have succeeded in Read More
The British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, whose Painted Sculpture exhibition is on view at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, has long enjoyed a highly successful career on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a career that began in England in 1951 when Mr. Caro (as he then was) worked as a part-time studio assistant to Henry Moore, Read More
There are currents of influence on the contemporary art scene so pervasive that, in retrospect, they seem to define an entire era. For a good many artists and critics who came of age in the heyday of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940′s and 1950′s, the principal influences were those of Jackson Pollock, Willem Read More
Before there was a New York School or an Artists’ Club, and before anyone above 14th Street had ever heard of the Cedar Tavern, there was the Jane Street Gallery in Greenwich Village, where a group of young, unknown painters-among them, Nell Blaine, Hyde Solomon, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Albert Kresch and Judith Rothschild-established a Read More
