Michael Tompkins was born to paint plywood—to be precise, the edges of plywood panels. In each of the five paintings in his New York debut at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery, Mr. Tompkins brings an astonishing gift for trompe l’oeil mimicry to depictions of the sad sack of lumber. Aligned along the bottom edge of each Read More
Let’s face it: There’s a class of highly accomplished American painters whose work has been consistently rejected by the New York museum establishment when it comes to mounting full-scale retrospective exhibitions. Although otherwise diverse in style and spirit, these painters can generally be characterized as representational but not confrontational. They deal with recognizable subjects, but Read More
The role played by friendship in the life of art is a seldom-discussed subject. This is probably why so few exhibitions have been devoted to exploring the aesthetic consequences of such friendships. In chronicling the course of modern painting, for example, we have generally preferred to codify its history in terms of movements and “schools,” Read More
Lucky is the artist who is born to his vocation. For an optimum outcome, however, what seems to be required-in modern times, anyway-is being born to a father of limited gifts who tries and fails at a comparable creative pursuit. In the history of 20th-century art, Picasso is the outstanding example: His father was an Read More
It was difficult to know what could be expected this year from The Art Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue. The Art Show is the annual mega-exhibition organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) to celebrate the role played by the galleries in the art life of the nation. It Read More
The passing of Grace Borgenicht, the art dealer who died on
July 19 at the age of 86, has set me to thinking about one of the
least-remarked-upon features of the New York art scene in the 1950′s, when the
city first emerged as the art capital of the Western world and an extraordinary
number Read More
New Yorkers driving out to East Hampton, L.I., for Thanksgiving may notice that the blue-and-yellow sign for Maya’s restaurant has been taken down from its perch near Ronald Perelman’s house on Route 27 in Wainscott. Whether the local branch of Randy and Maya Gurley’s famous St. Bart’s restaurant will also disappear from the Hamptons landscape Read More
The exhibition called Impressions of the Riviera , which Kenneth Wayne has organized this summer at the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, isn’t quite what you might expect it to be from the word “Impressions” in its title. Which is to say that it isn’t yet another roundup of the usual Impressionist suspects. Even the Read More
In the first room of the Mark Rothko retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the paintings all date from the 1930′s. They are not the paintings of a young artist-Rothko, who was still using the name Marcus Rothkowitz, was 33 when he painted his Self-Portrait of 1936-yet they remain the work of Read More
