8/24/11 1:10am

Art

Tom Sanford, "Portrait of a Genius" (2011)

Marlborough Gallery: Young at Heart

The artist William Powhida was a thousand miles away in Wisconsin on the evening of July 27 when a man claiming to be William Powhida drove into the ground-floor garage of the Marlborough Chelsea gallery in a vintage green Mercedes convertible, drinking from a bottle of Champagne. He sat on a couch that was barricaded off and continued drinking, inviting a few friends to join him. While an audience watched, the man bossed around an assistant, sent out messages on his Blackberry and flirted with the two svelte blond women seated next to him. A painting by the artist Tom Sanford hung on the wall: it was a depiction of the man who was in the gallery, acting the fool. In the painting, he was releasing a dove from his hands while a busty blond woman clung to his leg. It was all an act staged for a gallery opening. On the wall by the entrance, in big black letters, was the name of the show: POWHIDA. Read More

By Sharon Elizabeth Samuel 4/08/11 4:33pm

Art

Ms. Wright Remembers: Barnard Alumna Donates Her Holzer

“The engravings on the bench are kind of sassy,” said Virginia “Jinny” Wright. She was discussing a Jenny Holzer bench–until recently in her possession–that she’d donated to Barnard’s Morningside Heights campus.

“At the age of 82, I’m thinking about where some of these pieces should end up, and I thought Barnard would be the perfect Read More

By Adam Lindemann 5/05/10 2:10am

Secrets of the Star Art Collectors

Clichés die hard and slow, mainly because most people simplify things in order to process them. When it comes to art collecting, people love to talk up the storied collectors of old to give hope to new art buyers. Consider the oft-told tale of Herb and Dorothy Vogel, a retired postal clerk and an ex-librarian Read More

By Mario Naves 12/11/06 12:00am

Color Them Beautiful: Marden, Scully Paint Politely

“Who is Brice Marden painting for?” That’s what one veteran painter asked after visiting the Brice Marden retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Feeling impressed but dispassionate, he observed: “It’s as if Marden constantly looks over his shoulder as he paints.”

In a 1976 interview, Mr. Marden answered the question: “I paint for myself. Read More

By Hilton Kramer 9/19/05 12:00am

No Direction Known: Exhibit at Whitney Missing a Landscape

It was not to be expected that an exhibition called Landscape at the Whitney Museum of American Art would have much, if anything, to do with, well, landscape, which my dictionary defines as “A view or vista of scenery on land …. A painting, photograph, or the like depicting such a scene.” After all, landscape Read More

By Mario Naves 4/11/05 12:00am

Whitney’s Brick-Like Compositions Teamed With Glowing, Sunny Hues

The press release accompanying an exhibition of paintings by Stanley Whitney, on view at Esso Gallery in Chelsea, contains a lengthy excerpt from an essay by one Teresio Ottavio Camenzio. He describes Mr. Whitney’s abstractions thus: “Painting, from within the picture.”

This turn of phrase suggests that painting is a process within which the artist Read More

By Hilton Kramer 4/04/05 12:00am

Myron Stout LivedA Solitary Life, Painted in Context

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

By Hilton Kramer 11/29/04 12:00am

Freudian Gottlieb Turned to the Greeks In His Pictography

In art circles, it’s sometimes forgotten that the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters in the 1940′s were indebted to the modernist writers of the 1920′s, who elevated an interest in myth and symbolism to the level of an aesthetic imperative. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, both published in 1922, were Read More

By Hilton Kramer 12:00am

Rothko’s Progress Toward Abstraction Focuses on 1949

Among the many exhibitions of Mark Rothko’s paintings I have seen over the course of many years-and this includes major museum retrospectives-the two that have most profoundly defined for me the quality of his artistic achievement have both been organized at the PaceWildenstein Gallery. The first, called Bonnard/Rothko: Color and Light , was organized by Read More

By Hilton Kramer 7/01/02 12:00am

Transcendent Scenes of American Sublime Inspire Genuine Awe

Dear Reader: Perhaps, like myself, you have noticed that there is a tendency among critics and historians of art to become enamored of their own formulations. In response to certain developments in contemporary art, there is an understandable eagerness among the more intellectually ambitious of these writers to come up with a pithy phrase or Read More