Jasper Johns seems like a down-to-earth kind of guy. In an interview conducted by curator Nan Rosenthal, published in the catalog accompanying “Jasper Johns: Gray,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Johns answers questions with Hemingway-like curtness. It’s a self-effacing performance. You didn’t have to be there to register his droll, deadpan Read More
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
When someone who was once at the helm of MoMA promises to confront our uncertainties about the last five decades of nonrepresentational art, it’s worth taking notice. But despite the clear and perceptive intelligence of author Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003), Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock doesn’t quite answer its own bald-faced query: “What is Read More
“One of the most ambitious … undertakings in the Whitney’s history” is how Adam Weinberg, the museum’s director, describes Picasso and American Art, an exhibition that sets out to examine the “profound impact” Picasso had on painters and sculptors stateside.
It had damn well better be an ambitious undertaking. Picasso’s influence on world art—forget the Read More
“One of the most ambitious … undertakings in the Whitney’s history” is how Adam Weinberg, the museum’s director, describes Picasso and American Art, an exhibition that sets out to examine the “profound impact” Picasso had on painters and sculptors stateside.
It had damn well better be an ambitious undertaking. Picasso’s influence on world art—forget 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
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 knots Read More
Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings has left the Met, and not a moment too soon. Am I the only New Yorker happy that the tempestuous Dutchman has hit the road?
Whenever the Van Gogh name gets onto a museum marquee, you’re guaranteed an environment bereft of oxygen. I’m not talking about the crowds. It’s Read More
My students tell me the painter Julie Mehretu is hot stuff. Given the heft of her press packet, she must be: You can flip through its pages at the front desk of Projectile, a West 57th Street gallery that’s exhibiting Ms. Mehretu’s works on paper.
An impressive batch of clippings may signify a major reputation, Read More
Wednesday 4th
Some more things we’re just not on board with: the warmed-over meat loaf that is the new New York Times Thursday Styles section. White power males swimming naked? Yuck! (We give them exactly two weeks before they publish a feature on the “shaved scrotum” hipster look for summer 2005 … ); and don’t Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
