Imagine for a moment that in the days after Johannes Vermeer’s death in 1675, that his widow Catharina and eldest daughter Maria, sitting in a darkened room of the Vermeer home, conspired to settle their numerous family debts in a secretive way. Owing their baker the largest sum of money, the widow and her daughter would give up two of the Master’s last paintings to settle their debt. In a theory developed by Cooper Union art history professor Benjamin Binstock, the two debt-settling paintings were actually the work of the daughter, Maria Vermeer.
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Dissing the Stedelijk Museum’s new Mels Crouwel–designed wing, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman off-handedly compared the building to a “ridiculous” bathroom tub that suggested to him the sensation of “hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.” On the speed-rail ride back to Paris from a visit to the Amsterdam institution, it occurred to me that he completely got it wrong. Mels Crouwel did not give the museum a tub; he gave it a captivating sarcophagus, an often tub-shaped funeral receptacle designed to hold a corpse. And that is as it should be. After all, modernism is long dead.
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Despite my longtime interest in New York art from the 1970s, I somehow never imagined delving into an artistic process called, quite literally, “rectal realism.” However, last week, I found myself in a small room at the Gershwin Hotel at “Fresh Faces from the 1970s” a film screening and discussion, watching artist Neke Carson painting “I love you” with a paintbrush shoved in his butt.
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There are many reasons that the US and Allied troops won World War II. One of the more obscure ones may be the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, aka the Ghost Army.
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This week, photos in museums, why art critics matter, a street art site that “steals”, the East Village Eye goes online, political economy, a rapper’s run in with Marxism on Twitter, what American voters think of hipsters and more …
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If we can now grow a hamburger in a test tube, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, we will still be able to get to the meat of the matter?
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In part 1 of this month, reviews of She & Him, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Satinder Sartaaj, and Lady Antebellum.
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Don Voisine’s oil paintings on wood brim with all kinds of tensions: between flatness and spatiality; stasis and torque; containment and expansion; light and dark; tonal gradations and sharp contrasts; matte and glossy surfaces; transparency and solidity. Once you begin noticing the variety of stresses animating these paintings, more start to emerge — that’s how finely and tightly tuned they are.
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I have long admired John Walker’s work for its unique combination of tough materialism and romantic lyricism. I recently met him in his studio at Boston University, where he is the head of the MFA program. My visit with Walker happened to take place on the Thursday after the Boston Marathon tragedy, and I spent Friday’s citywide lockdown with painters Gideon Bok and Meghan Brady.
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