Art
A Creative Colony of Modernists in Coastal France
The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen's display of artists living and working independently, but together, reinforces the modernist commitment to internationalist values.
Joseph Nechvatal
Art
Isidore Isou's Radical Quest to Reinvent Language
A sweeping retrospective at the Centre Pompidou surveys the work of the Romanian-born artist who founded the avant-garde Letterism movement in 1940s France.
Art
A Tacky Tech Take on Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh, Starry Night degrades the work of the daring painter while underusing the awesome powers of immersive digital technology.
Art
The Unlikely Pairing of Caravaggio and Daniel Buren
Kamel Mennour Gallery highlights the enduring power of chiaroscuro by pairing a long-lost Caravaggio masterpiece with a shimmering site-specific installation by conceptual artist Daniel Buren.
Art
How Artists of the French Revolution Embraced Neoclassical Revivalism
Revolutionary Generation: French Drawings (1770-1815) from the Fabre Museum illustrates how, as the Rococo movement went out of fashion, France’s insurrectionist artists drew on ancient Greek and Roman art for inspiration.
Books
How Painting Survives in the Digital Era
In her new book, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, critic Isabelle Graw ruminates on how painting remains omnipresent within the contemporary capitalist system and digital economy.
Books
Bringing Back from Obscurity a Jamaican Photographer Who Worked with Duchamp
Enacting a posthumous reassessment, the book Percy Rainford: Duchamp’s “Invisible” Photographer has poignantly rescued the neglected artist Percy Rainford from erasure.
Books
Gary Indiana's Helter-Skelter Prose Experiments
In the 1980s I religiously read Indiana's weekly, polemical Voice dispatches in which he described the ills of US society from the point of view of an energetic, radical, gay critic absent art bona fides.
Books
A New Book Probes Duchamp's Last Hours of Life
Duchamp's Last Day is a bravo performance capturing the ephemerality of life and the physicality of art.
Art
An 18th-Century Designer of Fantastical Bodies and Imaginary Buildings Is Posthumously Recognized
Once relegated to academic footnotes as a bemusing curio, Jean-Jacques Lequeu is finally being fully recognized for his cheeky and dazzling drawings.
Books
Growing Up in the Avant-Garde Circles of Wallace Berman
Through his father, Wallace, Tosh Berman was in the middle of a vivid circle of artists, writers, and musicians who regarded art as the opposite of cultural business.
Art
How Alphonse Mucha’s Smoking Designs Made Art Nouveau
His images of towering women and mind-bending vegetal forms, found many audiences through theater posters for Sarah Bernhardt and rolling papers.