Author Archive
Burlesquing Media
Mel Ramos’ sexy variations It is when a cigar is not just a cigar that it is really fun. Mel Ramos understood that from the get-go. The playful, bawdy, brash retrospective selection at Bernarducci Meisel Gallery testifies to the gamesmanship that has made Ramos—and pop art, for all its flaws—so popular. In material and cultural...
Getting Medieval
Panel paintings at Feigen Late medieval imagination was joined to sacred purpose in every aspect of daily life. At the close of the Middle Ages, devotion itself was an art, one that lent gravity to all the other arts and shaped the tenor of living. Art was intended to ornament fleeting existence with symbols and...
Virtual Deity
For all Martin Luther King, Jr. articles, please go to: Belief with Wings I Have a Nightmare Virtual Deity Crowd Pleaser Stone Cold “The heretofore is just as important as the hereafter, ” wrote Michel Tournier, “especially as it probably holds the key to it.” The future of American race relations—our communal hereafter—has a large...
Abstracting the Real
Elizabeth O’Reilly’s Latest Lucid Display Modesty is not a characteristic of contemporary culture. The prevailing emphasis on self-assertion and the pseudoprofundity that fuels it in the visual arts leaves little room for the quietude and lucidity that is the hallmark of Elizabeth O’Reilly’s painting.
Children of the Towers
Exhibit uses innocence as a political tool Political mythology is a more significant player than art itself in shaping a culture’s mentality. Commemorating 9/11 by means of children’s artwork sentimentalizes the event and allows us to avoid calling the events of that day acts of war. 9/11: Through Young Eyes severs its subject from the...
Lloyd Martin
Lloyd Martin lives and works in Rhode Island. His achievement embodies Robert Hughes’ observation—made some 20 years ago—that Manhattan is no longer a creative center. A marketing center, certainly, but vital for the development of a painter’s talent? Not any more.
O’Beil: On Paper 2006-2011
It is always interesting to view the work of art critics. Most often, the soul of their criticism—its preferences and loyalties—is encapsulated in their own art. Hedy O’Beil has been a guide to the art world for close to 40 years. She contributed to Arts Magazine in its heyday, from 1976 to 1985, when it...
James Grashow: Corrugated Fountain
In his famous line, Mallarmé stated, “Everything in the cosmos exists to emerge as a Book.” If he were writing today, he might want to change that to Film. James Grashow worked for four years on “Corrugated Fountain,” an installation of melancholy and ephemeral beauty. A lifelong woodcutter, he carved and pasted the work out...
Thornton Willis
What we like to call “the Modernist grid” is really not modern at all. It is the application to painting of a structural pattern that is so ancient it can almost be thought of, in Platonic terms, as an Ideal Form. Thornton Willis’ latest exhibition at Elizabeth Harris exploits the grid’s primordial association with architecture....
An Exhibit of Magical Thinking
A cabinet of curiosities at the Hunter College galleries confuses articles of religious intention with assorted collectibles How to begin addressing the exhibit Objects of Devotion and Desire? I could take the high road and start this way: “Memory of the sacred lingers even among secular moderns who proclaim themselves celebrants of a totally profane...
In the Tonalist Mood: Paintings from the 1860s to the Present
Tonalism developed from two European springs: the French Barbizon School, by way of its American disciples, and Aestheticism. Practiced from the mid-19th-century into the early 20th, it was less a coherent movement than a shared sensibility among Europhile American artists. Chief among these were George Inness (and his followers) and James McNeil Whistler, American expatriate...
