Author Archive
Colors That Speak
From Classics to Lloyd Martin Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s busy and exuberant installation of works on paper (…On Paper) reflects the sheer diversity of American art in the 1940s through ’70s. The three dozen drawings, collages, mixed media works and paintings on paper cover a lot of ground—everything from Gaston Lachaise’s breezy line drawing of a...
The Steins Collect
Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde Gertrude was the assured and ambitious one; her brother Leo was intellectually brilliant but conflicted. Michael, the sensible brother, managed their money affairs, while his wife Sarah was thoughtful and empathetic—and just possibly the most insightful of all about art. This is the story, as related in the catalog...
From Self to City
Susanna Coffey’s Outward Visions Most gallery-goers will be familiar with Susanna Coffey’s self-portraits—those upward-turning faces, small and closely modeled, set beneath panoramic views. One such painting greets visitors to Coffey’s current exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. The rest of the show, however, concentrates on another, little-known facet of her work: the tiny, nocturnal...
Singular Journeys: Rosenthal’s transcendental landscapes
With her current show at Bowery Gallery, Deborah Rosenthal continues to infuse a highly personal approach with intimations of the mythic. Stylistically, the artist’s abstracted paintings have always recalled for me Robert Delaunay in their melodic, organic overlapping of planes of vivid color. (As a fellow Bowery Gallery artist, I’ve had the opportunity of observing...
Traditions of Newness
Gordon Moore put in context Where would postmodernism be without paradoxes of context? After all, even works as dissimilar as Jasper Johns’ flag and Jeff Koons’ chrome bunny both recontextualize the familiar to challenge our perceptions of them. At Betty Cuningham, Gordon Moore’s exhibition of abstracted paintings and photo-emulsion drawings poses similar questions about processes...
Enraptured by Nature: William Christine: New Paintings
William Christine’s paintings may not flirt with the cutting edge, but his landscapes at Prince Street Gallery impress for their sturdy pursuit of nature’s exuberance. Despite their brisk, brushy attack, simplified forms and vivid hues, his two dozen oil paintings and watercolors suggest an expressionism freed from any sort of indulgence, as if the artist...
Alienated Yet Alluring
Lauder selects and collects Euro classics Frequenters of the Neue Galerie know what to expect from this jewel-like museum on 86th Street: fine and decorative art from Germany and Austria and a highly elegant café to boot. At the moment, however, visitors will find a somewhat different installation celebrating the museum’s 10th anniversary. Until April...
Visions of Force and Watercolor
Revelations by Matthiasdottir and Rickert Suppose there was a kind of universal life force innate to all of painting—a force unique to the medium that continuously animated and characterized its subjects and was, moreover, accessible to artist and layman alike. Actually, something like this exists, and it has quite a pedigree. This force is the...
Everything’s Gone Green: Ruth Miller leaps forward
It’s no surprise that over the decades, the painterly landscapes and still lifes of Ruth Miller (b. 1930) have gained many admirers. Her vivid hues and richly scumbled surfaces have an immediate appeal, but more impressive still is the radiant restraint of a wise but ardent notion of painting: forms have a significance, colors contain...
Revolution In and Out
David and Delacroix from Louvre to Morgan Back in the 1990s, the Morgan Library lent some 200 drawings to the Louvre Museum. The Louvre has now returned the favor, and in impressive fashion. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre, currently at the Morgan, is a stunning selection of 80 of the museum’s...
Looming Large
Barnet’s Cards and Canvasses, Ingersol’s Fantasies Few, if any, artists have as lengthy exhibition histories as Will Barnet (some 75 years and counting). More impressive still, few have so regularly renewed their art with wholesale changes of style. The large retrospective exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Academy Museum provides a...
Painting the Times with Color
Whitney’s Feininger show takes art to the edge of the world Some artists respond to the traumas of their time by engaging them; consider Goya’s “The Third of May” or Picasso’s “Guernica.” For others (Matisse comes to mind), art became a kind of sanctuary, a refuge for exploring the transcendent. Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) falls squarely...
Soutine/Bacon
In case you didn’t know, the painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) had a thing about meat. His early break-through painting in MoMA’s collection—the one with the great sides of beef hanging symmetrically like a crucifixion—became a lifelong blueprint for mixing architectural elegance and grisly fleshiness. Years later, he revisited the event by commissioning photographs of himself,...
A Trip Through Psychedelia
The works on display by Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli and Terry Winters at Wave Hill offer a mystical visual journey New Yorkers who have never visited Wave Hill in the Bronx have missed out on one of the city’s most effulgent and enchanting displays of nature. This 28-acre estate—at various times the home of Theodore...
Leland Bell: Theme and Variation
We think of modern art as questing and experimenting, and, above all, a constant reappraising of means. Thus the New York School rejected the tired tidiness of the French School; Pop Art and Minimalism jettisoned the indulgent angst of Ab-Ex. But what of those individuals who bucked these broad trends and felt their own way...
Arp/Brancusi
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) and Jean Arp (1886-1966) both count among the great pioneers of modern abstract sculpture, and barely a decade separates their ages. And yet, temperamentally they seem generations apart. Brancusi transported the simple lifestyle of his Romanian peasant background to Paris, where he devoted himself to distilling the geometric essences of a few...
Celia Reisman: Paintings
If sheer quirkiness might be the strategy for much art of our time, Celia Reisman’s first exhibition at Paul Thiebaud’s New York gallery offers something different: an authentically strange mixture of the wise and the naïve. Her landscapes honor the visual aspect of nature, albeit in slightly simplified forms and heightened colors. But an intense...
Jackson Pollock: Drawings on Paper, Canvas and Sculpture
The most celebrated artists are usually preceded by their auras. Before entering a room of Van Goghs, we anticipate the air of a soulful loner; with Picasso, we expect a nose-thumbing, adolescent genius. With Jackson Pollock, we expect an impression of fierce and fearless self-discovery—and more than for most artists, the evidence of global shifts:...
Relief: Drawing in Depth
Sometimes a single exhibition can inspire an entire enterprise. Such is the case with Natalie Charkow Hollander’s memorable installation of relief sculptures at Lohin Geduld Gallery in 2004. These sculptures, which transposed scenes from master paintings into carved stone, moved Cynthia Harmon, Jock Ireland and Jolie Stahl to try their own hands in more pliant...
Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculptures by Esteban Vicente
Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) was the only Spaniard among the Abstract-Expressionists, and he was among the very few of them to devote considerable time to collage. His relative lack of recognition can be attributed to the fact that he started showing in New York a few years after de Kooning and Pollock—and perhaps, too, to the...
Five From L.A.
The title of Galerie Lelong’s current exhibition emphasizes the artists’ common home base, but they share other traits as well. All produce painterly canvases, all are women, all earned a masters degree within the past dozen years, and all already have serious exhibition records. What’s more important, their work—limited unfortunately to just two pieces by...
