Art
Naked in the Berkshires: 'Splendor, Myth and Vision' at the Clark
Art and power have a strong mutual attraction; in the West, their passionately shared interest is the nude body – particularly the female one.
Natasha Seaman
Art
Out of Time: Stephen Greene’s 1960s Abstractions
Visiting the exhibition of Stephen Greene’s paintings from the 1960s at the Jason McCoy Gallery is like hearing a squat black dial telephone ring next to an ashtray holding a freshly lit cigarette, the smoke curling up into a shaft of sunlight.
Art
Deluxe Redux: 'Asia in Amsterdam' at the Peabody Essex
SALEM, Mass. — The Dutch East India Company wrested control of the Asian spice trade from the Spanish and Portuguese, went on to own virtually all of Indonesia, and monopolized trade with Japan for 200 years.
Art
Class Disjunctions: Dutch Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Even to the trained eye, there is something unrelenting about most seventeenth-century Dutch art.
Art
Artists of the Dark: “Night Visions: Nocturnes in American Art, 1860–1960”
Nighttime darkness compresses space and alters colors, making ordinary places both more terrifying and more freeing, changing the social dynamic of those who walk in them.
Art
Sexy, Satin Surfaces: Paintings from the Dawn of the Dutch Golden Age
On its own, a painting by Joachim Wtewael can seem like a two-dimensional manifestation of an absurdly complex gâteau – gorgeous, delicious, but perhaps best taken in in small servings.
Art
A Generosity of Rembrandts: The Late Works at the Rijksmuseum
Rembrandt got old and poor and sad but he never got timid, as the 70 or so paintings on the walls of Late Rembrandt demonstrate.
Art
Capturing the Quotidian in a Fine Mesh of Crosshatching: Paintings and Drawings by Karl Stevens
Karl Stevens’ whisper-soft graphite drawings and smooth-as-ice oil paintings evoke comparison to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres yet portray neither odalisques nor aristocrats. Best known as a graphic novelist (Guilty; Whatever), Stevens’ canvases and sketches, like his comic strips and watercolors, r
Art
Objects of Wonder: Paintings and Sculptures by Richard Whitten
Richard Whitten’s paintings are provoking. They refuse to act entirely like paintings but are exceedingly not sculpture. They baffle you with titles in French, German, and Italian, optical illusions, and spatial inconsistencies rendered with mathematical precision.