The old man faces us, naked from the waist up. His bald head, covered in shadow but sharply defined, tilts forward at a niggling angle—as if its weight were increasingly untenable. His skin is translucent and seems barely capable of holding together. Propped within an almost impossibly compressed space, the man gazes intently at nothing Read More
Anyone extolling the virtues of Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, should start with one caveat: As with most blockbusters, the exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, books, ceramics—you name it—is impossible to take in during a single visit. There’s a ton of stuff to look Read More
Anyone extolling the virtues of Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, should start with one caveat: As with most blockbusters, the exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, books, ceramics—you name it—is impossible to take in during a single visit. There’s a ton of stuff to look Read More
The American painter Arnold Friedman (1874-1946) once groused about the “cadging—pettifogging [and] lickspittling” typical of the art scene of his day. Some verities are eternal.
Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to the Read More
The American painter Arnold Friedman (1874-1946) once groused about the “cadging—pettifogging [and] lickspittling” typical of the art scene of his day. Some verities are eternal.
Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to Read More
There are few things more humiliating than crying in Chicago. (One of them is crying in Detroit, which I have also done.)
Not long ago, I spent the optimal amount of time in Chicago, which is five hours. As a matter of habit, I spent those hours at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1997, Read More
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
There was a time, in the early decades of the last century, when the newly created museums devoted to modern painting tended to be so closely identified with the work of one or two major artists that these figures came to symbolize, in the public mind, the very spirit of the institutions and their collections. Read More
All artistic reputations are mutable, subject as they are to the shifting winds of fashion and ideology, yet almost no other major reputation in the art of this century has proved to be as vulnerable to the vagaries of critical opinion as that of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). Even to regard Bonnard’s as a “major” reputation Read More
