Visual Art
Cops and Blotters
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...
A Deluxe Act
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...
Petty, Humane and Perfect
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...
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...
Tribute to Dynamism
Appreciating the ageless sculptures of John Chamberlain (1927-2011) John Chamberlain’s sculptures of crushed automobile metal are as immediately iconic as Hokusai’s wave. Careful to explain that the material he used was not found but chosen, Chamberlain conceived sculpture as groups of semi-chaotic modules that could be coaxed to fit, and the result seemed the most...
Whitney Biennial
Members and patrons were lined up around the block on Wednesday night to attend the Whitney Museum‘s 2012 Biennial. The show opens to the public today and runs through May 27, Wednesday through Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm. Friday nights until 9 pm. The Whitney is at 945 Madison at 75th Street. Amanda Gordon,...
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 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...
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...
