Posted inArt

Dreaming in Argentina When Juan Perón Was President

There are a many reasons to go see Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, curated by Mia Freeman, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yves Klein leaps into the void and Lyndon Johnson’s nose grows long and pointed (would that this would happen to all politicians who lie to their constituents!). Freeman presents the work in thematic groups, such as “Politics and Persuasion” and “Novelties and Amusements.

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What Happens When There is No Center and It Cannot Hold?

Can any theory about art’s mission be universal? Or is a theory, with its investment in a narrative of progress, more contingent and narrowly focused than the art world is willing to acknowledge — enthralled as it currently is with deskilling and relational aesthetics, as it once was with Greenbergian formalism? Isn’t a widely regarded theory (or vantage point) a sanctioned form of exclusion? An approved way of privileging one thing over another? A smart way of establishing a hierarchy while claiming to be aligned with Marxism?

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What Happens When Painting Is No Longer A Gateway?

If anyone wants an indication of the ever-widening chasm between the art world and the museums, look no further than the career of Ralph Humphrey (1932 – 1990), a painter whose works calls into question every marker of progress brought to bear on art. The current exhibition at Gary Snyder—his first New York show in fourteen years—brought to mind the refrain that has been repeated since the artist died, not yet sixty, more than twenty years ago: a museum really ought to do his retrospective.

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Neither Here Nor There

Well known for working on very large sheets of wax-coated paper for the past twenty years, Toba Khedoori’s recent easel-sized oil painting will come as a surprise. In fact, the largest painting in her recent exhibition was around four-and-a-half feet by three feet, which is hardly monumental. To give you an idea of how much she has downsized for this exhibition, a work on paper in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, dating from 1997, is seven-and-a-half feet by nearly ten feet. And the MoMA drawing is small for Khedoori, who first gained national and international attention for works on paper that are twenty or more feet in width.

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From the Pictorial to the Abstract: The Recent Sculpture of Martha Friedman

Martha Friedman’s recent work marks a significant shift away from the sculptures that first gained her attention. Working within a territory that includes Rene Magritte, Claes Oldenburg and Vija Celmins, Friedman became known for casting enlarged versions of commonplace items; nails, cantaloupes, waffles, yucca plants, blue eggs, olives, rubber bands and cow tongues. Until this exhibition, her sculptures tended to be pictorial and irreverent, their wit something we associate with Pop art and the domesticated Surrealism of Roy Lichtenstein.

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A Map That Never Stays the Same

Sun Tzu’s Sixth Century treatise, The Art of War, is one of the precursors to Gertrude Stein’s How to Write (1931). Written in different epochs, under different dark clouds, war either in progress or just around the fork in the road, these manuals are invaluable to an understanding of writing and the written, but in dissimilar ways. The primary difference is that Sun Tzu believed in narrative, with its carefully constructed beginning, middle, and end. It was an arc, though not a rainbow.

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Closely Watched Trains: Josephine Halvorson and Charles Demuth

A studio visit prompted these thoughts about Josephine Halvorson’s paintings, which Nancy Princenthal has characterized as “resolutely airless and mute.”

Halvorson depicts close-up views of largely flat surfaces, often with a rectangle framed within the painting’s rectangle. In addition to conveying little depth, the surfaces usually contain a space we cannot see into, or they feature a closed door or doors. These tensions inflect our experience of the artist’s work, with its slow dance between the visible and the hidden, and between sight and touch. She seems to want the viewer to smell her objects as much as see them, to become familiar with the scarred and punctured surface (or skin) of their silent “faces.” For her, painting isn’t confined to sight. She lives in a world of things, not images – a three-dimensional realm far removed from the flattened realm of popular culture and the mass media.

Posted inBooks

Richard Baker, Physiognomist of Our Past and Future

Richard Baker is best known for his still-life paintings of tabletops, often tilted at impossible angles and covered with out-of-print art books and other bric-a-brac, such as ceramic pots, to-go food containers, candy bars, and tulips. Ranging from the lowbrow Learn to Draw by Jon Gnagy (Mr. “Learn-To-Draw”) to the hefty catalogue of the exhibition Paris-New York (1977) — the year the artist graduated from high school — Baker’s non-hierarchical representations form an inventory of the books that have, at different times, been central to his ongoing education, stretching from when he was a teenager until the present.

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The Modernity of Giovanni Battista Moroni (1524–1578)

There are four portraits by Giovanni Battista Moroni (1524–1578) currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum, and each of them is a gem. Two are included in Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: Northern Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrarra, Bergamo (May 15–September 3), an exhibition of fifteen modestly sized paintings, including “Orpheus and Eurydice” (ca. 1510–1512), the smallest Titian (1485/90–1570) I have ever seen, and, as they say, a youthful effort.