Art
The Pursuit of Art, 2016
The first painting I saw in 2016 was “Cockman Always Rises Orange” (2015): we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Jasper Johns
Art
The Fateful Attraction of Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch
Sometimes an exhibition, propelled by its clarity of purpose and emotional force, will lead you to a point that feels genuinely cathartic. And sometimes an exhibition will hit that mark and then shift into overdrive.
Art
Have We Been Misreading Jasper Johns All Along? Part Two
I want to focus on Jasper Johns’s three recent monotypes based on a Vietnam-era photograph of an emotionally shattered soldier, which are included in Jasper Johns: Monotypes at Matthew Marks.
Art
Have We Been Misreading Jasper Johns All Along? Part One
Perhaps we have all been reading his work too narrowly since his first show at Leo Castelli, more than a half-century ago.
Art
Pop Irony’s Enduring Influence in the Art Institute of Chicago's New Contemporary Collection
CHICAGO — The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, which opened in 2009, has reinstated its contemporary collection after giving over most of the space in 2015 to a much-lauded retrospective of the American sculptor Charles Ray.
Art
The Triumph of Revisionism: The Whitney’s American Century
With America Is Hard to See, the exhibition inaugurating its luminous new Renzo Piano building, the Whitney has reclaimed its role among the city’s museums as the engine of the new.
Art
At the New Whitney Museum, America Is Actually Very Easy to See
The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art, which opens to the public today, is predicated on the elusiveness of a cohesive and stable national identity in the United States.
Art
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).
Art
Jasper Johns Refuses to Play by the Book
Currently on view in the exhibition Jasper Johns: Sculptures and Related Paintings 1957–1970 at Craig F. Starr is “Book” (1957), a work I suspect many people either don’t know about or are not likely to have seen, even in reproduction.
Art
Thick Paint, Dazzle Ships, and Lipstick Bullets
Big sailing ships and their metaphoric potential appear to be on the mind of many cultural players of late.
Art
Tom Sachs's Pointless Americana
PARIS — In a search for art that reacts to the inequalities of globalization, must art lose touch with the sort of grace that exceeds the hand, a grace that couldn’t be anything but artificial and technological?
Art
Jasper Johns’s Reinvention of an Old and Familiar Subject
Regrets — the collective title of Jasper Johns’s most recent series of paintings, drawings, and prints — is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (March 15–September 1, 2014). The inspiration for the series was a ripped, crumpled and stained photograph of Lucian Freud perched on