Books
Barry Schwabsky Values the Viewer in His New Book of Essays
In The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting, Schwabsky’s readable and often chirpy essays philosophically examine what painting is and can become through an observer’s encounter.
Painting
Art
Painting Clings On
Painting’s funeral was canceled at the last minute.
Art
Once More Into the Culture Wars
To assert one’s inner life in a time of reactionary politics is a radical act.
Art
A Rare Look at a Little-Known, Intrepid Woman Painter of Open Air Landscapes
Sarazin de Belmont was a rare talent: a self-funded artist and a woman who broke the courtly codes to travel unchaperoned for several years as she created open-air landscapes on the Italian peninsula and the French Pyrenees.
Art
Kehinde Wiley Seizes the Throne
Wiley shows us that a Black man can indeed take the place of Napoleon.
Art
Jake Berthot’s Nowhere Land
All that I saw were some small and medium-sized paintings, mostly very dark, almost indistinguishable. How could I review this show?
Art
Issei Nishimura’s Soulful, Expressionistic Art
Intense and deeply personal, the Japanese self-taught artist’s work, now in its first-ever New York solo survey, defies easy labels.
Art
The Defiance of the Great Korean Painter, Yun Hyong-keun
After surviving the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and martial law, not to mention arrest, torture, and a narrow escape from a firing squad, Yun Hyong-keun developed a way of painting in which assertion and self-cancellation have become inextricable.
Interview
Beer With a Painter: Leslie Baum
“After the 2016 election, my work changed. I wanted to immerse myself in beauty and connect with something larger than the present moment, to not lose perspective.”
Art
Looking at Monet as the Planet Burns
At Giverny, by rendering landscapes of his own creation, Monet was not so much replicating nature as, in a sense, collaborating with it.
Art
A Contemporary Master of the Brushstroke
David Reed has figured out how to bring illusionism back into an abstract painting while remaining committed to paint-as-paint.
Art
A Private Memoir, Pried Open
Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theater? is the story of a difficult and painful redemption through art.