In his essay What the Sixties Meant to Me, the painter Rackstraw Downes writes of an encounter with a painting by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel. Mr. Downes describes The “Little” Tower of Babel (c. 1563) as “densely legible, a thousand stories in every square inch” and “equivalent to two or three books of the Read More
Whose idea was it to host concurrent retrospectives of Romare Bearden and Isamu Noguchi at the Whitney Museum of American Art? It was a brilliant stroke, really. Noguchi’s streamlined, abstract sculptures distill experience by expunging it of clutter; Bearden’s collaged portrayals of farmers, jazz musicians and religious ritual embrace clutter as a glorious and, at Read More
By all rights, I should be getting on my high horse to excoriate Mood Indigo: The Legacy of Duke Ellington , an exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Centered on the white baby-grand piano upon which Ellington composed many of his signature songs (the gallery breathlessly informs us that it’s valued at a million bucks), Read More
With certain exhibitions, this writer finds himself in a position not so much to “review” them as to recall his previous critical encounters with an oeuvre to which he paid close attention in the halcyon years of the artist’s production. This is the case with the large retrospective exhibition that Ruth Fine and her colleagues Read More
The Romare Bearden retrospective now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will, after winding its way through the United States, arrive at the Whitney Museum of American Art next fall. That gives New Yorkers who admire this important American artist something to look forward to. Still, I wish the retrospective had traveled Read More
Dense, Humane and Moral,
Bearden Sets a Fine Example
The Romare Bearden retrospective now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will, after winding its way through the United States, arrive at the Whitney Museum of American Art next fall. That gives New Yorkers who admire this important American artist something to Read More
