Art
Restless and Rigid
The work of Lee Mullican and others, including his friend Gordon Onslow Ford, shatters the myth that the only radical art being made in America in the 1940s and ’50s was by the Abstract Expressionists.
John Yau
Art
A Truly Great Artist
At once compassionate and angry, empathetic and satirical, tender and tough, Nicole Eisenman is a storyteller, portraitist, social chronicler, allegorist, fantasist, utopian dreamer and history painter, to name just a handful of her many artistic identities.
Art
Something New Under the Sun
Richard Van Buren studied ceramics at Mexico City College. Later, he moved to San Francisco, where he studied at San Francisco State (1961–64).
Books
Nicolas Hundley’s Heretical Machinery
Nicolas Hundley is a poet of pronouns. In many of his poems and prose poems, a pronoun – he, they, you, and we – is central to each line or sentence.
Art
Juan Uslé’s Brushstrokes
In his current exhibition, Membrana Porosa, at Cheim and Read, the artist’s first in New York since 2011, Juan Uslé shows fourteen paintings in the gallery’s four distinct spaces.
Art
Have We Been Misreading Jasper Johns All Along? Part Two
I want to focus on Jasper Johns’s three recent monotypes based on a Vietnam-era photograph of an emotionally shattered soldier, which are included in Jasper Johns: Monotypes at Matthew Marks.
Art
Have We Been Misreading Jasper Johns All Along? Part One
Perhaps we have all been reading his work too narrowly since his first show at Leo Castelli, more than a half-century ago.
Art
End of the Road: Matt Bollinger at Zürcher Gallery
In his third and best exhibition, Matt Bollinger: Independence, MO, at Zürcher Gallery, the artist continues to remember and invent aspects of his youth, family and friends, while growing up in and around Independence, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City.
Art
Sexual Abstraction: Judy Ledgerwood’s Recent Paintings
If, as Amy Sillman has said, “The elephant in the room is sex,” Judy Ledgerwood’s paintings ask the viewer: What exactly do you think you are looking at?
Books
Piercing Clarity: Gail Mazur’s Poetry
Aptly titled, Forbidden City is Gail Mazur’s seventh book of poetry. Before getting the book — which she sent me — I knew that Gail had written the poems in the years after her husband, Michael Mazur (1935–2009), had died of congestive heart failure.
Art
The Fly in the Ointment: Lee Krasner
One view of Lee Krasner’s career is that there is no dramatic rupture marking the emergence of something new — at least not like the widely celebrated ones that occurred in the work of her husband, Jackson Pollock, or with Willem de Kooning, or, later, Philip Guston.
Art
David Reed’s Panorama
The last time David Reed showed paintings in New York was in 2007, nearly a decade ago.