The artist and critic Fairfield Porter once suggested that painters have an easier time of it than sculptors. He contended in a 1960 essay that it “requires much more imagination to be a sculptor than to be a painter” and that “a sculptor’s activity is consequently more serious.”
Porter fails to back up this blunt Read More
Upon entering Oteiza: Myth and Modernism, an exhibition on display toward the top of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, you may wonder where the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) has been all your life. Though renowned in Spain—a museum devoted to his work opened in Navarre shortly before his death—his reputation hasn’t traveled much Read More
The immediate, unguarded response of first-time visitors to Sidney Geist: Phases of Sculpture, the exhibition currently on view at Jason McCoy Inc., is likely to be a mix of surprise, curiosity and delight. We don’t expect to see so much color in an exhibition of modern sculpture, or such captivating invention. We certainly don’t expect Read More
The sculpture of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), currently the subject of a somewhat truncated exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, has long been regarded as one of the glories of the modern era. Owing to this distinction, it has also, alas, attracted a good deal of misdirected criticism and fanciful interpretation. Some of this derives Read More
The exhibition called Endless Love , which the painter Mark Greenwold has organized at the DC Moore Gallery, is not to be mistaken for a show about sex or romance, even though the painting illustrated on the cover of its announcement-Hilary Harkness’ Gallic Beauties of Yesteryear (2001)-depicts a bevy of seductive, semi-clad girls strewn about Read More
With the passage of time, and the radical shifts of taste and sentiment that have shattered so many of the orthodoxies that once reigned supreme in the art world, certain larger-than-life reputations become more and more difficult to fathom. Consider the once-colossal renown enjoyed by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). For many of us Read More
Sometime around 1934, an 18-year-old American girl, Anne Harvey, painted a remarkable portrait of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi in his Paris studio. Brancusi, who was an accomplished photographer, also took some delightful photographs of Anne Harvey. For a time, moreover, he was Anne Harvey’s principal art teacher as well. She had already studied with Leger, Read More
Few sculptors of the modern era have matched the success of the late Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) in meeting the very different challenges of an art designed for public space and an art conceived to serve as an object of private delectation. He had few peers, either, in successfully negotiating an esthetic dialogue between the traditions Read More
