Emily Mason remembers her mother saying, “I’ll be famous when I’m dead.” Though fame may not be quite secured (yet), the artist’s first-ever monograph acts as bulwark against forgetting her legacy.
Abstraction
Posted inFilm
How Hilma af Klint Was Written Out of History
The new documentary Beyond the Visible is more of a detective story than a straightforward biography, investigating the erasure of an important figure in abstract art.
Posted inArt
Decolonizing Western Narratives of Modern Art
The Met Breuer mounts recent acquisitions from Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, West Asia, and North Africa alongside mainstays of postwar American art, sketching a potential reorientation of art history.
Posted inArt
Exploring Sexuality and Myth Through Fiber and Other Types of Sculpture
While Mrinalini Mukherjee radically used textiles to negotiate the deep roots of symbolic Indian art and craft, her visual vocabulary sought independence from traditional roles within her culture.
Posted inOpinion
Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till
Presuming that calls for censorship and destruction constitute a legitimate response to perceived injustice leads us down a very dark path.
Posted inArt
Can Abstraction Help Us Understand the Value of Black Lives?
ST. LOUIS — Several months ago, I made the commitment to be away from New York City, my home and native land, for the duration of this summer.
Posted inArt
The Woman Who Found Abstraction Before the Modernists
LONDON — The first thought that struck me about the Serpentine Gallery’s exhibition of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, Painting the Unseen, was: Thank goodness — finally a solo show starring a female artist!
Posted inArt
The Little-Known Engineer Who Made the First Abstract Paintings in the US
MUSKEGON, Mich. — What’s especially significant about Manierre Dawson is that he made his breakthrough to non-objective imagery prior to any exposure to modernist art.
Posted inArt
A Refreshing Dose of Cynicism-Free Abstraction
Clare Grill is a painter based in Queens. She has shown consistently, if not quietly, over the last few years.
Posted inArt
New Abstraction, 45 Years in the Making
Nothing new under the sun? Does it really matter? “The past,” as William Faulkner wrote, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past cannot be ignored, disdained, used up or discarded; it’s the ligand that strings us all together.
Posted inArt
MoMA’s Show of Shows: “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925”
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 tradition of world-class scholarship presented in gloriously visual terms.
Posted inArt
Beware the Tragic Sublime
My first exposure to Eugène Leroy’s (1910–2000) work goes back to 1973: a small group in just as small a storefront in an eighteenth-century Flemish baroque-style building close to the historical center of Lille, a city on the French/Belgian border. I only went to see the show — mostly Flemish regional artists all of the same generation — at the insistence of some of my beaux-arts student friends. We stood in silence in front of a medium size painting by Leroy, trying to make sense of the profligacy of paint in front of us when we could barely afford the few tubes of oil paint we needed for our studies.