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...

Looking behind the scene of the crime In 1972, the photographer Leonard Freed set out to document the daily lives of New York City police officers. He wanted to humanize the police force, arguing that “if we do not concern ourselves with who the police are—who they really are…we run the real risk of finding...

Gallagher connects the dots at MoMA Museum exhibitions curated by artists are always an interesting journey into the artist’s brain. Sometimes we find out things we really didn’t want to know, like a hidden passion for paintings of big-eyed children or a love of the color beige. Sometimes, however, we get to peer deeply into...

Sherman, Rembrandt and Degas in portrait What would art be without fiction—that is to say, without the allusive sweep of metaphor? Literature, music, painting, poetry, dance, film—you name it, every medium thrives when it embodies something beyond its material means. “Art that conceals art” is old news, of course, but that’s not to say it...

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...

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...

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...

History of Tibet Pop at Rubin Museum 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 for Barney’s, its...