Fifth Avenue always connotes money, but stories of fortunes lost are now in the air, and as if on cue Rembrandt is on at the Frick. In fact the New York Rembrandt is there, Self-Portrait (1658), the largest of his signature self-portraits, painted two years after his infamous bankruptcy, returned home to the mansion’s Oval Read More
One evening in 1645, while dining, Rembrandt van Rijn realized that there was no mustard on the table. Rembrandt, so the story goes, bet his friend Jan Six that he could complete a sketch in the time it would take a servant to fetch the condiment. The master, a swift draftsman, won handily. Read More
The curious and often contentious relationship between artists and critics has a long, if not always noble, history. That’s as it should be. Friction between practice and opinion is inevitable. Sometimes it can shed light; often it prompts comedy, intentional and otherwise. The critic has been the target of some deliciously caustic works of art. Read More
Let’s get the ugly truth out of the way: Galleries are commercial enterprises—in short, they’re stores. Profits may not be the motive for starting a gallery (usually a genuine love of art is involved), but capitalism has a way of overshadowing aesthetics. Which isn’t to say that the two are mutually exclusive. Take, for instance, Read More
“Your class is a cult classic …. Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato …. It’s properly intellectual … nobody’s pretending the tomato will save your life. Or make you happy. Or teach you how to live or ennoble you or be a great example of the human spirit …. Read More
What Is Aesthetic Resolution?
The Question Posed at the Frick
Attend to the vagaries of the contemporary scene long enough and you could come to the conclusion that no one much cares about art anymore. The “challenging,” “transgressive” and “edgy,” sure-there’s no shortage of dealers, collectors, curators and critics eager to swoon at the Read More
There are exhibitions that ought to have a notice posted at the entrance warning visitors susceptible to mental depression and other psychological disorders to beware the premises, lest they succumb to profound melancholia when they encounter the paintings on view. One of these hazardous exhibitions, Odd Nerdrum: New Paintings , is currently at the Forum Read More
About the exhibition called Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher , which Clifford S. Ackley and his colleagues have organized with the Arts Institute of Chicago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the first thing to be said is: Don’t miss it! This is a marvelous show, the kind of show that many visitors Read More
Of the many intellectual faults that have plagued the study of art in recent decades, one of the least forgivable has been the campaign to discredit the idea of connoisseurship. At the outset, about a quarter-century ago, it was a campaign largely confined to university art-history departments, where training in connoisseurship-which concentrates on aesthetic distinctions-came Read More
The ease with which the late paintings of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) have been accepted as masterpieces of late 20th-century art constitutes one of the great embarrassments of the contemporary scene. Commonly referred to as “the Alzheimer’s paintings,” the pictures have received the most extravagant of accolades. Critics, curators, artists and collectors have hailed them Read More
