I fear that the visual culture in which these works were admired is now one of those distant “you had to be there” moments, which are impossible to reconstruct.
Morris Louis
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The Colors of the Sixties
Spilling Over: Painting in the 1960s at the Whitney Museum expands the common understanding of a pivot point in American art, while basking unapologetically in the pure pleasure of looking.
Posted inIn Brief
Sylvester Stallone Knocked Out by Video Art
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta was recently visited by onscreen boxer, bottled water enthusiast, and aspiring abstract painter Sylvester Stallone, who documented his visit in a shaky video selfie he shared on Instagram today.
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Why Does the CIA Keep Its Art Collection Secret?
Twenty-nine abstract Washington Color School paintings hang in the halls of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But unless you’re one of the CIA’s undisclosed number of employees, your chances of ever seeing these paintings, or even digital images of them, are pretty slim.
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Subversive Color at the Rose Art Museum
WALTHAM, Mass. — To say that painting is having a moment would be ironic – since, despite periodic claims regarding its demise or return, it clearly never went very far away.
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America’s Grand Gestures Reign Supreme Again in Basel
BASEL, Switzerland — Fifty-five years ago, the exhibition The New American Painting arrived at the Kunsthalle Basel. It was the first stop on a yearlong tour that touted the work of seventeen Abstract Expressionists before eight European countries — the first comprehensive exhibition to be sent to Europe showing the advanced tendencies in American painting. All but five of the original artists from the show had work on view at last weekend’s Art Basel, where postwar American painting and sculpture dominated the halls.
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Need Your Condo Decorated? Jessica Snow at Jen Bekman
There are condos going up all over Williamsburg, facades decked out with panels of bright colors that bring to mind a sort of yuppie Piet Mondrian: sickly oranges, pea greens and off-reds, all surfaced fiberglass matte and smooth. All those bare walls seen through the under-construction picture windows must need something to hang on them, right? In the burgeoning gallery scene on the Lower East Side, Jen Bekman has an answer: anemically pretty, blandly abstract paintings by Jessica Snow.