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
An Indispensable Reminder:
Civilization’s Not a Done Deal
Talk about timing. Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus , an exhibition that recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, focuses on the art and culture of Mesopotamia, “the cradle of civilization” encompassing modern-day Iraq as Read More
One of the casualties of culture, brought about by the ascendance of the Dadaist esthetic, is the devaluation of artistic tradition. For many contemporary artists, tradition is not a vital fund of inspiration and a continuum with which to be engaged. It is, instead, a grab bag of stylistic markers to be exploited at will. Read More
It is with decidedly mixed feelings that I return to the work of Julian Schnabel, whose so-called Plate Paintings are currently the subject of a mini-retrospective at the Pace Wildenstein gallery. In my experience, anyway, writing about Mr. Schnabel always brings some variety of opprobrium in its wake. When, nearly 20 years ago, I wrote Read More
For aficionados of the most absolute of all forms of modernist painting-strict geometrical abstraction-the current exhibition at Pace Wildenstein, Mondrian and Reinhardt: Influence and Affinity , is undoubtedly the event of the season. It brings together the work of the greatest pioneer of geometrical abstraction, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), with that of the Read More
