The American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) created one of the 20th century’s strangest and most quixotic bodies of work. Through the tender arrangement of dolls, balls and assorted Victorian ephemera inside weathered wooden boxes, Cornell distilled memory from loss. No other Modernist invested the bastard medium of assemblage with such aesthetic coherence—not its inventor Kurt Read More
Looking at a piece of art from up close and at a distance lends itself to different, if related, kinds of experience. The artist works at arm’s length, whether wielding a brush, a chisel or a chunk of charcoal. Intimacy is implied through touch, but in engagement too. Yet artists step back from their efforts Read More
This is a good time for abstract painting.
(The loud thwack you just heard is the sound of abstract painters all over the city smacking their foreheads in disbelief: What is he talking about?)
Take a look at what dominates the scene: big-budget installations, obscurantist videos, interminable performances, conceptualist novelties, anti-art high jinks and Read More
To mark the centenary of the birth of Joseph Cornell (1903-72), Richard L. Feigen and Company has organized a superb exhibition of the artist’s shadowbox constructions and collages, and in the same spirit of homage this show is accompanied by two very different tributes to Cornell’s extraordinary career. One is a large, lavishly illustrated book Read More
What do art critics mean when they speak of an artist’s work as having an essentially “poetic” quality? The late Fairfield Porter, who was himself a minor poet as well as a first-rate painter and critic, gave us the best answer I know in something he wrote about the pictorial shadowbox constructions of the American Read More
The first thing to be noted about the mammoth Surrealism exhibition that has now come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that it was not organized by the Met itself. Surrealism: Desire Unbound, as this misshapen behemoth of a show is called, is a production of London’s Tate Modern, where it has already been Read More
