The Pattern and Decoration movement was a hard-charging assault on traditions both ancient and oppressive. It was also an explosion of joyously liberated impulses.
Carter Ratcliff
Carter Ratcliff is a poet, art critic, and contributing editor of Art in America. His writings on art have been published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum; the Royal Academy, London; Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome, and many other institutions. He has contributed to the leading journals of the United States and Europe, including Art in America, Art Forum, ArtNews, Arts, Tate, and Art Presse, as well as Vogue, Elle, and New York magazine. His books include The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, and monographs on Andy Warhol, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gilbert & George, and others. Among his books of poetry are Fever Coast, Give Me Tomorrow, and Arrivederci, Modernismo. His first novel, Tequila Mockingbird, was published in 2015.
Posted inArt
Every Dealer’s Nightmare: The Inevitability of Fakes
The media almost always overlook what is truly interesting about fakes: not who made them, who sold them, or who was in on the scam and who was not, but what they tell us about art and those who produce it.
Posted inArt
The Originality of Joanna Pousette-Dart
Pousette-Dart embraces the world without representing it.
Posted inArt
Jan Harrison’s Dream Animals
To respond to an animal in Harrison’s imagined world is to grasp how closely its existence is linked with that of all the others.
Posted inArt
Brice Marden’s Intuitive Formalism
Each work in Marden’s series Cold Mountain Studies is the trace of a transient intention, and their variety is potentially infinite.
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Alain Kirili’s Embodied Abstract Art
Throughout his career Kirili has evoked the body in his abstract sculptures, in an era when sculpture has often sidestepped the human form.
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Expressions of the Fullness of Being
In Natvar Bhavsar’s art, all is in flux; everything is both what it is and all that it might become.
Posted inOpinion
The Whitney’s Dilemma
The Whitney has not had the moral courage to reject support from a benefactor who generated his wealth in socially irresponsible ways.
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Seeing Ourselves in Sculpture
Richard Nonas’s sculptures alert each of us to the specificity of being — in a specific time and a specific place.
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Visualizing the Imaginary and Unseen
Nicolas Carone questions our understanding of the image and gives us no definitive answers.