Art
The Writing on the Wall, the Paintings in the Basement
It’s not uncommon for artists to fall short of their own expectations, only for the public to find delight in the charged gap between the aspiration and the goal.
Thomas Micchelli
Interview
Standing on the Edge of Space: Painting as Noun and Verb
Oil on canvas. Evolving motifs. Line embedded in color. Compositions suspended between chaos and stability.
Art
The Object Is Not an Object: Cubism, Photons and Two by Fours
This week’s news of a major gift of Cubist works — possibly the most important in the world — from Leonard Lauder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art marks a landmark event for New York’s cultural heritage, but it also redirects our attention, however fleeting, on what the movement was about and what
Art
Alien Skins: Experimental Italian Painting of the 1960s
Sometimes the quietest and most unassuming exhibitions turn out to be the most fascinating, if not the strangest. Tucked away on the third floor of Sperone Westwater’s Bowery building, there’s a show titled Post-War Italian Art: Accardi, Dorazio, Fontana, Schifano. That’s it. No jazzy tagline like “
Interview
“Revealing Soul” — Painting’s Cosmological Constant
What is the kernel of art? Does it lie in the form or subject, or in the shifting territory between the two? When do you manipulate the medium, and when do you follow its lead? Where are the parameters, if any, delimiting what art can contain? A painter like Ben La Rocco doesn’t ask these questions;
Art
The Presence of Paint: Baker Overstreet’s Pleasure Principle
Every now and then we realize how much we live in a digital mirage. Take Baker Overstreet’s show at Fredericks & Freiser. Although this is the artist’s fourth solo in New York, I hadn’t yet seen his work in the flesh, my only exposure being images and reviews.
Art
In the Schnabel Chapel, Part 4
The final installment of Julian Schnabel 1978–1981, the rotating exhibition of four of the artist’s early works, has arrived with "Abstract Painting on Blue Velvet" (1980). If you’re seeking closure, however, I doubt that you will find it here.
Interview
Speaking in Tongues: Art in Moods, Tenses, and Translations
It’s safe to say that Twilit Ensembles, Paul D’Agostino’s solo show at Pocket Utopia, is one of the more disorienting, even vertiginous exhibitions around. There are pairs of process-driven, not-quite-identical abstract paintings; mixed-media collages that evoke the Art informel and Affichiste strai
Art
Single Point Perspective: The Future of Henri Matisse
I’m rarely taken aback by a Matisse. The reasons admittedly have more to do with personal taste than with aesthetic discernment, in particular an overriding interest in architectonic structure; in the “Matisseite” and “Picassoite” factions dividing Gertrude Stein’s pre-World War I salon, I would hav
Art
In the Schnabel Chapel, Part 3
As an undergraduate, I took a seminar in contemporary art issues conducted by the theater designer Robert Israel, who once mused about coming across one of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1950s-era combines in a collector’s pristine white apartment. The artwork, composed of recycled scraps of garbage, “looked
Art
Art Glut and How to Handle It
By Monday, the reality of the mandated reductions in government spending, otherwise known as sequestration, had begun to sink in. For its part, the New York Times announced, to no one’s surprise, “the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in t
Art
In the Schnabel Chapel, Part 2
“The Patients and the Doctors” (1978) is Julian Schnabel’s first plate painting. It is also the title of a prose poem/essay he wrote for the February 1984 issue of Artforum, a ham-fisted manifesto that did little to dispel his reputation for defensive bluster.