Around this time each year, art critics who normally laugh at a "Top Ten" list as an aesthetic criterion are prompted to cite their "Top Ten" favorite exhibitions, events, ephemeral holes in the gallery floor, etc., from the past year. These lists seem to serve two purposes. The first is to shame those of us Read More
What standing does the landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) have in the history of American art? As a student, I remember Inness occupying a marginal nook, his place obscured by the homegrown transcendentalism of the Hudson River School and by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the holy trinity of 19th-century American painting. Read More
What standing does the landscape Give a Painter His Due:
Inness Deserves Top Honorspainter George Inness (1825-1894) have in the history of American art? As a student, I remember Inness occupying a marginal nook, his place obscured by the homegrown transcendentalism of the Hudson River School and by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Read More
Walking through Challenging Tradition: Women of the Academy, 1826-2003, an exhibition on display at the National Academy of Design, I was reminded of a conversation with the artist Elizabeth Murray that I heard on a radio talk show about eight years ago. The occasion for the interview was an exhibition Ms. Murray had organized for Read More
Gender Gets a Boost:
Women Artists on TopWalking through Challenging Tradition: Women of the Academy, 1826-2003, an exhibition on display at the National Academy of Design, I was reminded of a conversation with the artist Elizabeth Murray that I heard on a radio talk show about eight years ago. The occasion for the interview was Read More
If you’ve ever wondered what a large cross-section exhibition of contemporary American art would look like if it were selected entirely by professional artists, rather than by dealers, curators, critics or collectors, the show not to miss at the moment is the 178th Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design. Be warned, however-or should Read More
There are works of art so spellbinding in their beauty that they transport us beyond the mundane and often dismaying exigencies of day-to-day existence and prompt the kind of experience-uplifting, expansive, profound -that we expect from art. I was transported in this way when I visited Cultivated Landscapes: Reflections of Nature in Chinese Painting , Read More
In his review of Winogrand 1964 , an exhibition currently at the International Center of Photography, Daniel Kunitz, art critic for The New York Sun , wrote that “given enough rolls of film and enough time, almost anyone could come up with a handful of great shots.” Mr. Kunitz’s qualifies his remark with a strategic Read More
There is a passage in one of Henry James’ essays on painting in which the writer, sounding his characteristic note of irony, poses the following question: “Was Rubens lawfully married to Nature, or did he merely keep up the most unregulated of flirtations?” I thought of this observation recently when I went to see the Read More
There is a passage in one of Henry James’ essays on painting in which the writer, sounding his characteristic note of irony, poses the following question: “Was Rubens lawfully married to Nature, or did he merely keep up the most unregulated of flirtations?” I thought of this observation recently when I went to see the Read More
