The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum is not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
Man Ray
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The Illustrated Correspondence of Artists
Before people were dropping GIFs into Gmail, letter writers were adding illustrations for that emotional or contextual punch.
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Finding Contemporary Threads in the End of Dada
PARIS — In our stimulating era of online publishing, it is all the more exciting to look back at paper precedents. And Man Ray, Picabia et la revue Littérature (1922-1924) at the Centre Pompidou provides just such an opportunity by focusing on the period between the end of the Dadaist movement and the advent of Surrealism.
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Henri Langlois: Remembering a Titan of French Cinema
PARIS — With the ubiquity of cinema today — in airplanes, on the internet, on cable movie channels — familiarity may not always breed contempt, exactly, but it does tend to inspire complacency.
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Nancy Cunard’s ‘Black Atlantic’
PARIS — The display for Black Atlantic by Nancy Cunard at the Musée du quai Branly evokes a period when the artistic and literary avant-garde became intertwined with the political and the glamorous.
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Before the Selfie, the Self-Portrait
CHICAGO — The selfie is a smartphone-produced version of the self-portrait, which has been a staple of art and photography history since artists first began seeing examining their own images in the mirror.
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Model/Surrealist/War Photographer Revealed Through Thousands of Images
Some people manage to live many lives in their one existence, and Lee Miller with her journey from Poughkeepsie to the Surrealist scene of Paris to the front lines of World War II was definitely a woman whose life could not be singularly defined.
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Automatic Transmission: Drawing Surrealism
Surreal. It’s one of those words like insane or awesome that’s taken a beating from aggressive misuse. I’ve heard the term applied to both a bus driver wearing a funny hat and the sight of the second plane hitting the tower. “It was so surreal,” that long e sung out like an animal’s cry of distress, is one of the more commonplace characterizations of any even vaguely untypical experience. The show currently at the Morgan Library and Museum, Drawing Surrealism, affords an opportunity to get reacquainted with the ideas and art behind the now overly familiar adjective.
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The Precious Gems Art History Forgot
Imagine strolling through clean, bright halls, surrounded by immaculate display cases filled with baubles and trinkets, the steam-polished precious metals and gems coruscating in the glare of spotlights. Hear your feet clacking on the white floors, stopping to look closer at the jewelry on display, but not close enough to stir the ire of the security guard peering over your shoulder. Imagine wanting everything you see, from diamond diadems to neon-tubed necklaces. No, you’re not in Tiffany’s or Cartier, you’re in the Museum of Arts and Design, gazing at their new show, Picasso to Koons: The Artist as Jeweler.
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A Perceptual Dance Party for Your Eyes
Abstraction is a fickle shapeshifter. Outlines of horses and bulls in caves and geometric markings on ceramic flatware were the earliest embodiment of the craft. Since then, abstraction has travelled through an unbelievable number of incarnations. James McCoy Gallery recently took on the challenge of presenting a hiccup’s worth of abstraction from the 20th Century, anticlimactically titled 70 Years of Abstract Painting: Excerpts. The showing was based on the gallery’s strong holding of abstract art, looking to “initiate an unusual dialogue” between past and present.
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20th C Moderne at the Armory
If the contemporary side of the Armory is flashier with its glamor and energy, this is the tried and true historical wing that presents a more reserved modernist face but not one without a lot of seduction. Here are some of my picks for what to see if you visit.
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Performance Art Through the Lens
MoMA photography curator Roxana Marcoci knows that we are experiencing a “renaissance of performance”. The show she has curated in collaboration with Eva Respini, Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, will explore the role of the photographic image in this surge of performative work, both as a document of the performance and as art work on its own. The MoMA exhibition, which opens this Friday January 28, begins in the 1960s at a time when performance began to emerge as a singular field of art based on the carrying out of specific art actions.
