Sept. 11 has occasioned a lot of art, and most of it is lousy. No surprise, really: It’s rare to find a painter, novelist, playwright or filmmaker who can tease out the nuances of actual, often devastating events or bring order to them. The typical artist robs history of gravitas by burdening it with sentiment Read More
What does John Updike know about art, anyway? Enough to write about it perceptively. The renowned novelist’s art criticism appears in The New York Review of Books and has been collected in a newly published book. But he doesn’t know enough—or, perhaps it is better said, see enough—to re-imagine its historical and aesthetic contours. Read More
What does John Updike know about art, anyway? Enough to write about it perceptively. The renowned novelist’s art criticism appears in The New York Review of Books and has been collected in a newly published book. But he doesn’t know enough—or, perhaps it is better said, see enough—to re-imagine its historical and aesthetic contours.
In Read More
What, for other artists, might be considered excess—excess energy, excess emotion, excess ambition, excessive quantities of paints and other materials for making paintings—is, for Joan Snyder, a minimum of what a painting requires. She belongs to the school that labors in the belief that Too Much Is Hardly Enough. As a consequence of this painterly Read More
In art, as in life, opposites attract. Which is to say that artists often find inspiration in what they reject: An act of repudiation may serve as the starting point of an original conception. Something like this dialectic of attraction and denial seems to have governed the life and work of the American painter Myron 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
The exhibition St. Adolf-Giant-Creation: The Art of Adolf Wölfli takes up more than half of the American Folk Art Museum, occupying three of its five floors. It’s on the museum’s third floor, however, where the promise of Wölfli’s art and, for that matter, “outsider” art itself is fulfilled. Because he is, in so many ways, Read More
The American painter Paul Resika, born in 1928, studied with Hans Hofmann while still in his teens and had his first solo exhibition in New York at the age of 20. He’s thus been a notable presence in the New York art scene for nearly half a century. I long ago lost track of the Read More
How could anyone not love Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)? Given the pluralist fog we’re currently muddling through, perhaps the question should be rephrased: How could anyone who loves the art of painting not love Hofmann? The retrospective of his works on paper, now on display at Ameringer/Howard, isn’t much more than a patchwork introduction to the Read More
Stick around the gallery scene long enough and certain figures become ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that visiting their most recent exhibition is less a matter of necessity than of duty and grudging duty, at that. This outlook borders on the cynically apathetic and can ultimately lead to the most pickled of perspectives. But in Read More
