One sign that Arthur Dove: Watercolors, on display at Alexandre Gallery, is a museum-quality exhibition is the fact that the curators have included artifacts: In a pair of vitrines containing objects from the artist’s studio are tubes of paint, jars filled with pigment, brushes, oil-stained pages from an old treatise on color and even Crayola Read More
Two of my favorite American art museums, the Phillips Collections in Washington, D.C., and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., are this season collaborating on an exhibition that has brought the cream of the Atheneum’s 20th-century collection to Washington for the first time. The show is called Surrealism and Modernism: From the Collection of the 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
The Leland Bell exhibition, which has come to the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries after a yearlong tour of college museums, is not to be missed by anyone with a serious interest in the art of painting. Bell, who died in 1991 at the age of 69, has been a very distinctive figure on the New York art Read More
The American painter Jacob Lawrence, who died last year at
the age of 82, had the good fortune to enjoy a long and cordial association
with the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.. The connection dated from
1941, when the museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, acquired the 30 odd-numbered
panels from the artist’s 60-picture Migration
Series on Read More
There are retrospective exhibitions of well-known artists that ought to be accompanied by a warning label that would read: Do not understand this artist too quickly! In other words, what you know, or think you know, may not be all there is to know. The French painter, sculptor and caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), whose work Read More
For anyone with a keen interest in modern painting for the esthetic and intellectual pleasures it affords-rather than, say, for the political and cultural battles that have sometimes marked its history-the exhibition that is not to be missed this fall is Renoir to Rothko: The Eye of Duncan Phillips , which is currently on view Read More
How good was Georgia O’Keeffe? As a painter, I mean.
As a personality O’Keeffe was, by all accounts, extraordinary. She certainly had little trouble captivating the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, who was not an easy mark-though he did, to be sure, have a thing about women much younger than himself. But as an artist? How Read More
As readers of this column have ample reason to know, I am not an optimist by nature. About the current state of the New York art world, moreover, I am especially gloomy. And foremost among the causes of that gloom in recent years has been the appalling record of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Read More
