Books
How Alexander Calder Made Modern Art Move
In the second volume of a definitive biography, the art critic Jed Perl recalls how the innovative artist revolutionized sculpture.
Jed Perl
Test 2018 posts
What Do Art Critics Actually Do?
Artists, collectors, curators, and dealers are all needed for the system to function, but the role of critics is up for grabs.
Books
The Making of a Modernist in the First-Ever Biography of Alexander Calder
Jed Perl makes the case that Calder was both an avant-gardist and a populist.
Art
Painting Everday Objects in All Their Glory
Painting reached a turning point with Paul Cézanne wherein a picture would no longer be conceived simply as a window onto the world with the artist at a remove from the act of creating.
Interview
The Immoveable Feasts of French Modernism
LOS ANGELES — In 1988 Jed Perl, a critic in his mid-thirties who had written for Vogue, Art in America, and The New Criterion, published his first book: Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I.
Opinion
"Liberals Are Killing Art," or Critic Jed Perl Gets Emotional
Jed Perl, a savvy polemicist far above fatuous windbag trolling, is mad as hell. Why? Because "Liberals Are Killing Art," according to the headline accompanying the art critic's latest for The New Republic.
Books
Jed Perl’s Magicians & Charlatans: In An Ailing Art World, the Best Discoveries Can Stir the Soul
As the American critic Jed Perl points out in his new book, Magicians & Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture (Eakins Press Foundation, 2013), a collection of essays about subjects in the fields of Renaissance, modern and contemporary art, today the forces of “art as money” have vanquished those of
Opinion
How is MoMA's "Abstract Expressionist New York" Faring Online?
The Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture, an ambitious exhibition that (kinda) rethinks the standard narrative of Abstract Expressionism (aka AbEx), has been open since October 3. The show complicates things by reintroducing us to artists not entirely within the Ab