The exhibition devoted to the Italian Modernist painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), on display at Paul Thiebaud Gallery, doesn’t contain much: six paintings and two drawings.
It’s appropriate, in a way. Morandi spent his maturity painting not much: boxes and bottles, a landscape here and there, few things in abundance. Even so, is a less-is-more curatorial Read More
There’s no epithet in the art world quite as damning or feared as “conservative.” Sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? The word carries with it the stale smell of convention, easily digested comforts and hidebound principles. (Forget politics; we’re talking aesthetics here.)
Certainly there’s no creature so roundly mocked by contemporary tastemakers. People twist themselves into Read More
The modern mind doesn’t easily accommodate itself to the idea that the art of painting may sometimes achieve the status of a spiritual vocation. Christian iconography plays a central role in many of the paintings we regard as masterworks of Western art, and yet our response to those paintings tends, for the most part, to Read More
Unless you’re a devotee of 15th-century Netherlandish painting, chances are you’ve only stopped to give a cursory look at Hans Memling’s diminutive painting on panel, Portrait of a Man (c. 1470), as you’ve made your way to the Frick Collection’s big-name, box-office draws. That’s less likely to be the case next month, when the venerable Read More
“Sublime” isn’t an adjective that a critic should bandy about promiscuously. Used appropriately, it can describe the paintings of Fra Angelico and Vermeer, but the word is pretty much depleted thereafter. Having said that, there it is, “sublime,” sitting atop the page of notes I took while standing in the Betty Cuningham Gallery looking at Read More
