A little detail in an artwork can reveal that sometimes what is right on the surface can change our understanding of the whole.
Alex Katz
Posted inArt
The Intertwined Lives of Artists in a Community in Rural Maine
The artists in Slab City Rendezvous influenced, nurtured, collaborated with, and painted one another, merging into one big happy family.
Posted inArt
The Colors of the Sixties
Spilling Over: Painting in the 1960s at the Whitney Museum expands the common understanding of a pivot point in American art, while basking unapologetically in the pure pleasure of looking.
Posted inBooks
Artist Interviews and the Literature of Self-Endorsement
In three recent volumes, artists express nostalgia for the smaller, scrappier New York art world.
Posted inArt
Painting According to Art Basel Miami Beach
At Art Basel Miami Beach, if you only look at the art, it’s an affair worth the trip, because if you want to see the newest art made in Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Barcelona, or Berlin, it’s here.
Posted inArt
Beer with a Painter: Alex Katz
“It’s been my most productive summer ever,” Alex Katz declares. “The real work is here, though,” he tells me, unrolling pounce paper to show me his preparatory drawings. “I want to go even bigger,” he says.
Posted inArt
The Prince of New York City
It is easy to forget just how really good a painter Alex Katz can be. This is because he makes everything look so easy and natural.
Posted inOpinion
Things We Associate With Pantone’s Color of the Year 2013
Pantone’s Color of the Year 2013 is… emerald! The company’s famed color consultants have come up with the single hue that will define our coming year, and it’s a deep, elegant version of green.
Posted inArt
Single Point Perspective: How To Join The Club and Live Happily Ever After
Lichtenstein and Warhol might have been using the same source material, but they were hardly after the same things, as the latter’s subsequent work would quickly make clear.
Posted inArt
An Implied Critique of Sound Bite Society
Rackstraw Downes doesn’t seem like a radical. He is an understated Englishman who paints understated American landscapes. But when you think about how much of modern and contemporary art relies on juxtaposition or exaggeration for effects, Downes’s approach begins to seem downright revolutionary. “My idea is to paint the real nature of the world, which is always a complex mixture of things,” he told a packed auditorium at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, during a talk last month.
Posted inArt
Five Works of Art for the Beginning of Summer
This post is an image-only art mix tape of 5 works of contemporary art chosen around the theme of summer. It’s my look at the oncoming season through art, specifically inspired by our recent humidity.
Posted inArt
Pittsburgh: The Great Deceiver (Part One)
On April 29, 1974, the prog rock masters King Crimson played a famously furious gig at the Stanley Warner theatre in Pittsburgh, later immortalized as part of the band’s towering 4-disc live set, The Great Deceiver. In 1974, the steel industry was wheezing its way out of town, and the city was careening toward a difficult decade filled with a shifting economy and populace. The malleability of the Crimson dinosaur was exactly what the city was going to need to recover. And they have, thanks to the medical and tech industries (And ROBOTS!).
In the 70’s, out of the ashes and soot of the crumble came something extraordinary for the art world. In 1977, Barbara Luderowski founded The Mattress Factory, an installation space that is the highlight and anchor of every visit I make to the city. Yet, too many people I know still think of Pittsburgh as it was in the famous painting by Aaron Henry Gorson pictured here. Let’s work on that. Starting with the fact that a visit to the ‘Burgh is almost always a galvanizing one.