When an exhibition is as puzzling as this one, it’s useful to step aside and reflect.
Louise Nevelson
Louise Nevelson’s Graphic Imagination
Nevelson used drawing as a creative bridge back and forth into the making of sculpture.
US Army Teams Up With Conservators to Preserve Outdoor Art
Art conservators and the Army Research Laboratory are working together to conserve outdoor painted sculpture by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Tony Smith.
Delicate Paintings from Drag Icon Vaginal Davis Meet Monumental Sculpture From Louise Nevelson
With 20 tiny paintings and one hefty sculpture, an unexpected pairing of artists offers a nuanced take on femininity.
The Open-Ended Narratives of a Small Museum
What if Abstract Expressionism never happened?
A New Louise Nevelson Biography Picks Apart the Artist’s Contradictions
Laurie Wilson, practicing psychologist and art historian, has penned a new biography of the ground-breaking artist Louise Nevelson.
What Abstraction Can Teach Us About Race and the Color Black
Blackness in Abstraction is one of the best opportunities in years to face the riddle of the color black and the phenomenon of blackening.
A Los Angeles Mega-Gallery Opens with Museum Ambitions
LOS ANGELES — Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, the local outpost of mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, will open its massive hybrid art space to the public on Sunday.
A New Documentary Champions the Photographer Who Captured Wright, Calder, and Nevelson
Photographers who shoot the work of famous artists are rarely celebrated in their own right, but a new documentary shifts the focus onto the man responsible for some of the most iconic images we have of Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder, and Louise Nevelson.
I See Pretty Things at Design Miami
MIAMI BEACH — It was refreshing to wander around a Miami fair that doesn’t appear to have a fear of pretty things. In the design world, unlike the art world, beauty isn’t considered a dirty word, so, wandering through the aisles of the 2013 Design Miami fair, I could see an obvious affection for beauty in a way that oozes status and wealth.
The Overlooked Prints of the Abstract Expressionists
Tomorrow, Swann auction house will be presenting a sale, “Atelier 17, Abstract Expressionism & the New York School,” which showcases the prints of the Abstract Expressionist era that are often overlooked because the larger, flashier paintings inevitably grab the spotlight. The sale has a particular emphasis on the co-operative printmaking workshop Atelier 17, which was started in the Paris studio of English painter and draughtsman Stanley William Hayter in 1927. When World War II began, Hayter fled Paris for London and eventually settled in New York after a very short stay in California during the 1940s. The first New York incarnation of Atelier 17 popped up at the New School of Social Research but eventually the studio found a home at 41 East 8th Street in the heart of artistic Greenwich Village. Jackson Pollock lived across the street.
Art That Thinks Inside the Box
What is it about boxes that is so fascinating? I was thinking this as I went into Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to see Pandora’s Box, a show that displays artist Joseph Cornell’s signature assemblages alongside the works of artists who allegedly were inspired by him or who were in artistic sympathy with him. I can think of historical precedents: medieval reliquaries; Victorian memento mori, which often look strikingly like Cornell’s miniature worlds. But these forebears don’t quite explain the combination of weirdness and visual beauty of something made by Cornell, nor the undoubted fascination with him since his death. His boxes frame the objects in a different way than a conventional picture frame, of course; they concentrate the viewer’s attention; but there’s something else, which finally came to me after I’d seen this show.