An exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais tracks art made in Mexico during the first half of the 20th century, focusing on the influence of the European avant-garde and Mexicans’ celebratory attitude toward death.
Diego Rivera
Posted inArt
Painting a Fuller, More Complicated History of Mexican Modern Art
An exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts explores the many strands of Mexican modern art, shedding light on artists and movements beyond the best-known muralists.
Posted inOpinion
Seven New York City Streets That Should Be Renamed After Artworks
Today New York’s City Council voted on a proposal to co-name the block of Stuyvesant Avenue between Lexington Avenue and Quincy Street in Brooklyn “Do the Right Thing Way” after the Spike Lee joint that was filmed there in 1989.
Posted inArt
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Offer Dueling Accounts of Detroit’s Industrial Glory
DETROIT — The Detroit Institute of Arts’s major exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit closes on Sunday. This show was in the works for a decade, long before the city’s bankruptcy and the grand bargain, which shifted the ownership of the art from the city to the museum.
Posted inArt
The Private Language of Painting, Revealed in Artists’ Images of Their Studios
Gagosian has done it again: produced another museum-quality show, this one devoted to images of artists’ studios, as recorded in photographs (on view at its uptown gallery) and in paintings (installed at West 21st Street).
Posted inArt
Detroit Through the Eyes of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
The period between April 1932 and March 1933, when artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo sojourned in Detroit, was a desperate time for the city.
Posted inOpinion
From Dalí to Leonardo on the Backs of Playing Cards
When Brazilian artist Sōnia Menna Barreto was a teenager in São Paulo, her mother used to stay up all night long playing cards with her friends. That memory sunk into Barreto’s consciousness, surfacing in a surreal series of trompe l’oeil paintings the artist has been creating over the last few years.
Posted inArt
Tax Tips for Artists
T.S. Eliot’s claim that April is the cruelest month feels particularly true during tax season. Assuming you’re an artist in the United States who makes at least $10,000 a year, you may be scrambling to file your return before tomorrow’s deadline.
Posted inArt
Paintings in the Interzone: More from the Corridors of MoMA
Last year I wrote an article called “What You Might Be Missing at MoMA,” which discussed the paintings exiled to the corridors of the Museum of Modern Art’s fourth and fifth floors.
Posted inNews
Early Diego Rivera Uncovered on Antiques Road Show
Masterpieces sometimes pop up in the strangest places. Antiques Road Show, that public television stalwart showing unwitting collectors having their finds appraised, has uncovered plenty of surprises, but this is one of the biggest. A Road Show participant from Corpus Christi, Texas, brought Boston-based antiques expert Colleene Fesko a 1904 easel painting by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.
Posted inArt
Impressions from SFMOMA: A Photo Essay
BERKELEY, California — I just moved to Berkeley, California after living in Brooklyn for two years and the second arts institution I visited was SFMoMA (the first was the Luggage Store gallery but I didn’t have my camera with me). The museum is not unpleasant but has an odd construction with a consistent zebra-stripe patterning throughout — it reminded me of the Orvieto Cathedral in Umbria, Italy.
Posted inArt
Patti Smith, MoMA and a Revolutionary Year
On December 19th of last year, Patti Smith and Michael Stipe gave a “walk-in performance” in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the centennial of Jean Genet — poet, playwright, novelist, radical leftist, hustler and thief.
It was also the final day of the uprising in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, which started three days earlier when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, set himself on fire and burned to death to protest the confiscation of his merchandize by the police. The timing of the performance and the Tunisia riots were, of course, purely a coincidence.
On December 19th of this year, alone with her guitar, Patti Smith returned to the same place — now occupied by an enormous obelisk holding aloft Sanja Iveković’s golden, hugely pregnant “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg” — to mark Genet’s 101st birthday.