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Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) was the rare scholar with the ability to alter the way we think about art, history and culture, and, inferentially, the things we create. “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind” is the title of an essay first published in 1953 in Partisan Review and later in Steinberg’s landmark co
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Is it possible to look at Julian Schnabel’s “St. Sebastian” (1979) with fresh eyes, as if the past 34 years of Schnabel Sturm und Schnabel Drang never really happened? As if it were a new painting fresh out of an unknown artist’s studio, landing inconspicuously in a storefront gallery on East 10th S
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You could look at Environmental Service’s exhibition, What is Yours is Mine, as a maximalist spin on Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953). But you’d be wrong.
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Nancy Spero died in 2009 at the age of 83. The current exhibition of her hand-printed collages from the 1980s and 1990s, From Victimage to Liberation, at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea, is the first show in New York to focus on her work since her death.
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Last year at this time, Sperone Westwater staged a show called Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week. Included in that exhibition was “Infinite” (2011), a pair of intertwined automobile tires carved with exacting verisimilitude by Fabio Viale.
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Currently at Team Gallery’s two venues, on Grand Street and Wooster Street in Soho, there is an exhibition simply titled Black Cake. Curated by Alex Gartenfeld, it includes only two artists from Team’s roster (Massimo Grimaldi and Ryan McGinley) out of sixteen participants, which puts it outside the
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What’s the difference between the lackadaisical and the slapdash? Apparently, a great deal. Although he is employing the same strategies and materials that he used in his 2010 solo exhibition at DCKT Contemporary on the Lower East Side, I found the just-opened Cordy Ryman: Shuffle / Scrap / Echo at
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Just the other day, I was deep in the bowels of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I thought of Paul Resika. I had met him briefly many years ago, when I was a graduate student and he was a guest critic. In the middle of a group critique he mentioned that he visited the
Interview
Wandering through the Museum of Modern Art, I came across the gallery partially devoted to the work of Robert Rauschenberg. It was the first time I had been there since the iconic “Canyon” (1959) — the one with the stuffed bald eagle — was donated to the museum by the Ileana Sonnabend estate.
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Today is the final day of a wonderful exhibition that crept into town during the holiday crush and threatens to leave just as quietly, after little more than a three-week run.
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Tomorrow, Patti Smith will turn 66. The day before yesterday, on the 27th, her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye reached the same age. “We’re three days apart,” Smith announced last week in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art at her “walk-in” concert celebrating the birthday of the French writer Jean
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Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, the new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, should be the kind of show that MoMA was made for, and it is. Like last year’s de Kooning: A Retrospective (which could have been subtitled Deconstructing Abstraction), the new show draws on the museum’s finest traditi