Naughty Naked Nude Controversy at The Met By Mona Molarsky Do women have to be naked to get into the museum? The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest photo show suggests that—in 2012—the Guerilla Girls are still on target. Naked Before the Camera, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is presented as the history of the...

Max Ferguson Honors His Elder  Max Ferguson has spent his life painting scenes of New York, particularly older areas of the city like Coney Island and the disappearing mom-and-pop shops. Largely autobiographical, his works usually depict himself or his father. In his evocative exhibition Painting New York—From Jerusalem, he shows 30 paintings that he has...

A revisionist look at a political painter Art is nothing if not revisionist in that it demands that we look, and then look again. That’s a fancy way of saying there’s a new fat man in my aesthetic life I had dismissed—not so much for his girth as for his perceived misogyny. I am not...

Alex Prager paints pulp fiction If you like your art and cinema on the pulp side, I highly recommend you cakewalk over to Yancey Richardson Gallery to see the latest Technicolor noir dreams of Alex Prager. This exhibition marks the debut of her newest film, La Petite Mort, and an accompanying exhibition of photographs entitled...

Fresh views of Nerdrum and Woodman A nagging question surrounding the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, on display at Forum Gallery, is:  Can you still paint like that? “Like that,” as if the past 400 years of Western art hadn’t transpired; to put brush to canvas, without irony or affectation, in the style of Rembrandt and...

Bharti Kher’s Sculptured Spaces Bharti Kher’s work manages to be big, open and intensely private all at once. Her pieces draw you in; they demand a certain amount of time. The current exhibit at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, The Hot Winds that Blow from the West, contains only a handful of works, but each...

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...

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...

Vital Parts Rearranged at MoMA A show to give you nightmares and rip through your subconscious, Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration at MoMA is not so much about decay as rearrangement. The slight misnomer of the title hints at the gothic quality of the 90 paintings, drawings, images, pen-and-inks—you name it—by artists as disparate and...