Visual Art
Original Copies: Fu Baoshi adapts to revolution
The title of The Metropolitan Museum’s new Chinese painting exhibit, Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965), is misleading. The painter in question did live through the establishment of the Chinese Republic, the Sino-Japanese wars and the rise of the Communist party, but Fu is far more academic than revolutionary. It is...
Post-Colonial Pictures: Modernist Indian painting liberates the Rubin
I love the Rubin Museum of Art, a jewel of a museum housed in the old Barney’s store on Seventh Avenue. However, since its opening in 2004, the museum has struggled with how to be more than just a historical institution. There have been a few forays into the contemporary art world, all tied to...
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...
The Blur of Modernism: From Japan to Sarah Sze
The advent and subsequent triumph of modernism did much to diminish the role of narrative in the visual arts, insisting, as it did, that the exigencies of craft should take precedence over anything smacking of literature. But modernism is an historical blip—a significant blip, mind you, but a blip all the same. Narratives have dominated...
Turning Journalism Into Art
Djuna Barnes makes news at Brooklyn Museum By Marsha McCreadie We may have been reading the wrong thing all along. Blame it on T.S. Eliot, who proclaimed Djuna Barnes’ stylistically avant-garde Nightwood equal to great Elizabethan tragedy—the novel was canonized by many in lesbian literature as a breakthrough: a lightly disguised version of Barnes’ breakup...
Karma Komix
History of Tibet Pop at Rubin Museum By Renfreu Neff Visitors entering the lobby of the Rubin Museum of Art are welcomed with soothing Eastern music played by live performers nestled in the curved foot of an elegant spiral staircase—the building is itself a landmarked structure created by the noted French architectural designer Andrée Putman...
Lichtenstein in Motion: Three Surprises on Whitney Screens
By Marsha McCreadie They are in town for a just a few more days, but since the only three films by Roy Lichtenstein, of Pop Art and the comic book style, haven’t been screened since 1971, you don’t have to think twice about catching them. Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein is at...
History Lesson: Leutze
How Washington icon crossed the pond From time to time over years of visiting The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I would find myself in front of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” About 12 and a half feet high and 21 feet long, the huge rectangle was simply and plainly framed, hanging at just...
Spotland
Journey through Hirst’s dotty past Damien Hirst is tapping into a simple fact: We all like smooth surfaces and bright colors. Since 1986, the bad boy British artist, notorious for his installations of floating animals in cases of formaldehyde, has produced about 1,500 spot paintings, white canvases covered in colorful circles. (He has an army...
Mechanical Garden
Pollack’s error makes art Carrie Pollack is a poet of impermanence. Her subject is memory and the visual echoes that surround us everywhere. On daily walks with her camera, she records deteriorating poster debris, the sky at a particular moment—the usual stuff to which we ordinarily pay little attention—then subjects the imagery to computer processing...
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...
Lovely Challenges
Buchwald and Lenaghan go for clarity The paintings of Howard Buchwald, on display at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, are as much a call to arms as an exhibition of art. Listen to Buchwald tell it: “Painting is not in the service of some purpose, objective, image or idea residing outside, prior to and independent of the...
Modern Masters at Montclair Art Museum
Beginning Feb. 12, Montclair Art Museum, located at 3 South Mountain Ave. in Montclair, N.J., will host the exhibition Look Now: Modern and Contemporary Art from Private Collections. The exhibit will feature multi-media works by 31 modern masters and cutting-edge artists—including Roy Lichetnstein, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison and Ryan McGinness—through June 17. For more...
From Id to Paper: Dubuffet intros art brut
The year starts off with quite a bang at Ricco/Maresca Gallery. The current exhibition, Dubuffet and the Art Brut, is a museum-quality exploration of Jean Dubuffet, as well as the circle of artists that he admired and in some cases collected. Undoubtedly these had a profound effect on Dubuffet’s own artistic development. The connections made...
Bard Graduate Center’s The Actress as Artists’ Muse
Return to a world in which stage actresses were treated like rock stars Feb. 9 with The Actress as Artist’s Muse: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Ellen Terry. The special lecture at the Gallery at Bard Graduate Center will find art historian Peter Trippi, editor of Fine Art Connoisseur and former director of Dahesh Museum...
Art Crawl 2012 Kicks Off Feb. 4
This Saturday, Feb. 4, join ARTLOG for the first Art Crawl of 2012. Beginning at 3 p.m. at The New Museum, 235 Bowery, the fifth annual event (presented in partnership with Thrillist, The New Museum, Columbia University Alumni and The Appraisers Association) will celebrate the Lower East Side’s leading galleries from 3–7 p.m., concluding with...
Cecil Fabulous: Beaton’s New York Years Revived
By Marsha McCreadie One high aesthetic compliment is to call an artist ahead of his time. Yet the real trick is to be of your time and ahead of it, too. Cecil Beaton—photographer, illustrator, set and costume designer, even author—turned that trick, and nicely, too. The fabulous results, even a hint at his motivation, are...
Pay Dirt and Pigment: Theresa Byrnes mines the human condition
In her manifesto for Dust to Dust, Lower East Side artist Theresa Byrnes states: “I am not afraid to get dirty, I am not afraid of the cold—I have a high discomfort tolerance, I am not afraid of the rare disorder of the nervous system I have (Friedreich’s Ataxia). Because of FA I ride a...
Two Masters
Turning on to Leaf and Dickinson The Whitney Museum is honoring Sherrie Levine, an artist who helped usher in postmodernism—as if New Yorkers needed another reminder of that movement’s deadening intellectual certainties. Better the arbiter of American art should dedicate its institutional clout to June Leaf, a veteran painter and sculptor whose prodigious oeuvre needs...
Three Degrees of Art: Paul Sharits’ on location masterpieces
Paul Sharits made his first film Wintercourse (1962) at age 19 while studying painting at the University of Denver. There he became a protégé of Stan Brakhage, 10 years older and already in the forefront of the international film avant-garde. The “beat era” was evolving into “counterculture,” and Sharits’ generation began inheriting the weight of...
Lawton’s Curve Ball
Artist Reflects on City Visions “Curved Reality” is an exhibition of paintings by New York artist Pamela Lawton. It is an unusual show of New York City vistas that takes the urban architecture culture of New York and creates a painterly visual experience. Lawton’s work uses form and color to depict a reality that is...
