Art
When Disaster Can't Be Pictured
To represent the world is to understand it, and to understand it might, hopefully, help cope with a plague.
David Carrier
Books
A Close, Dazzling Look at Michelangelo’s Painting
Leo Steinberg’s compelling essays pull you into the interpretative process, asking you to see the drama he unpacks.
Art
Color Field, Then and Now
I fear that the visual culture in which these works were admired is now one of those distant “you had to be there” moments, which are impossible to reconstruct.
Art
Sculpting With Light, Drawing With Shadow
It’s hard to identify precedents for Christopher Wilmarth’s sculpture, which uses its banal modern materials purely abstractly.
Art
Taking Appropriation Too Far
To manipulate the historical record, I would think, is to abandon the search for truth.
Art
Kehinde Wiley Seizes the Throne
Wiley shows us that a Black man can indeed take the place of Napoleon.
Art
Jake Berthot’s Nowhere Land
All that I saw were some small and medium-sized paintings, mostly very dark, almost indistinguishable. How could I review this show?
Art
Do the Old Masters Still Speak to Us?
Now and then, I suspect that an honest art writer might feel as if he or she is losing it.
Art
When the Exhibition Becomes a Work of Art
Who would have thought that still lifes would create such a strong reaction?
Art
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Painter of Modern Anxiety
Kirchner was the anti-Matisse.
Art
The Endlessly Inventive Jörg Immendorff
Imagine Gustave Courbet’s materialism joined to Max Beckmann’s aggressive color, with a dash of Caspar David Friedrich’s visionary panoramas thrown in.
Art
El Greco, Modernist Hero
Set the works of El Greco alongside those of Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, or Pablo Picasso, and you can see why they admired and copied him.