Art
The Shock and Awe of George Grosz
George Grosz in Germany, on view at the New York Studio School Gallery, offers a rich overview of Grosz’s development as an artist and dissident.
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Books
Beautiful Books, Terrible Times: The Free Expression of Soviet Children's Lit
The 1920s in Russia weren't exactly what people had hoped they would be. After the 1917 Russian Revolution brought down the old regime and the Soviets took over, there was a swelling sense of hope in a potential egalitarian Communist future. Yet only a few years later, censorship was curtailing art
Opinion
Contract Fever: The Legal Dance of Gallerists, Buyers, and Artists
“Above $1 million, you kind of expect it now. These are business people who are used to contracts accompanying every sale they make. It is the same to them if they are buying or selling companies or artwork."
Art
Made in New England: The 2013 deCordova Biennial
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Stashed away in the tony suburbs just west of Boston, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and its engagement with the wider, grittier world outside its gates has sometimes been called into question. But the museum has begun focusing its attention every two years on local arti
Art
How to Look at Ad Reinhardt's Cartoons
At David Zwirner gallery right now, you can see an entire room of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings. It's the first chance to do so in New York since 1991. But you can also see work for which the artist is lesser known — in particular, his cartoons.
Art
Terracotta Daughters: An Army to Battle Gender Imbalance in China
French artist Prune Nourry is exploring this issue of gender selection in China by riffing off of one of its most iconic heritage sites: the Terracotta Warriors.
Community
A View from the Easel
Artist studios in Massachusetts, New York City, and Ontario.
Art
Painting for Oneself: On Peter Heinemann’s Self-Portraits
Forty years passed between my first hearing about Peter Heinemann’s self-portraits and my actually getting a chance to see them. A number are currently installed in a garret-like room at the National Academy Museum as one of several posthumous inclusions in the group exhibition See it Loud: Seven Po
Art
He Who Controls the Past: Highlights from "The Shadows Took Shape" at the Studio Museum
One part a literary subgenre of sci-fi, pioneered by the likes of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, and one part cross-cultural, interdisciplinary aesthetic movement, Afrofuturism — a term coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future"— can be tricky to describe.
Opinion
To Instagram or Not to Instagram?
One of the stories making the rounds in the art blogosphere at the moment is an article from LiveScience, which details a study that found people were less likely to remember artwork they saw in a museum if they photographed it. The findings dovetail nicely with an essay by Eric Gibson in the curren
Art
An Architecture of Poetry and Sound
To experience “Frolic Architecture” is to enter into a world that feels both familiar and bizarre. The piece, a collaboration between composer David Grubbs and poet Susan Howe is a delicate sound collage, rich with layers, solemn, and mildly, comfortably disjointed.
Art
Quickening the Pulse in Miami
MIAMI BEACH — Parsing contemporary art's inscrutable pecking order of markets and sensibilities is already a miserable endeavor, but the stakes inch ever higher in Miami, where the tantalizing gruel of celebrity gets spread preciously thin.