The 2005-6 art season has begun—but only barely. The notable museum shows—Fra Angelico at the Met, Memling’s Portraits at the Frick and Oscar Bluemner at the Whitney—won’t go on display until next month. Commercial spaces are out of the gate faster. In the next couple of days, many galleries in Chelsea—and, lest we forget, 57th Read More
The 2005-6 art season has begun—but only barely. The notable museum shows—Fra Angelico at the Met, Memling’s Portraits at the Frick and Oscar Bluemner at the Whitney—won’t go on display until next month. Commercial spaces are out of the gate faster. In the next couple of days, many galleries in Chelsea—and, lest we forget, 57th Read More
The French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), currently the focus of a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has for so long been so highly acclaimed and so gleefully debunked that a critic revisiting his work in the first decade of the 21st century is obliged to surmount a good deal of documentary Read More
Like so much else in contemporary cultural life, the romance of the exotic has become a casualty of its own success. The engines of modern travel, publicity and consumption have so radically eroded our ignorance of faraway places and alien cultures that it sometimes seems as if there’s no place left on earth where we Read More
The heady dream of extending the physical scale of painting to a size well beyond that of the traditional easel picture is one that many modern artists have been tempted to pursue. The ostensible hope was to achieve an integration of art and life far greater than it was believed possible for the modest dimensions Read More
Of the many modern artists who have sought refuge from the
encroachments and commercialism of modern civilization in primitive,
out-of-the-way places of unspoiled natural beauty, the French painter Paul
Gauguin (1848-1903) is probably the most legendary. The story of his
life-quitting a profitable job on the Paris stock exchange and then abandoning
his wife and Read More
The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), whose career is currently the subject of an interesting exhibition at Hunter College- A Painter’s Poet: Stéphane Mallarmé and His Impressionist Circle -has long been regarded by artists, esthetes and specialists in modernist thought as one of the saints of the artistic vocation. In his lifetime he enjoyed the friendship and esteem of Manet, Read More
Going through the wonderful exhibition of The Private Collection of Edgar Degas at the Metropolitan Museum the other day, I thought of the passage in Paul Valéry’s Degas Dance Drawing , in which the writer, who knew Degas in his later years, offers his reflections on the scrupulousness of the artist’s judgments.
“All he could Read More
