News
Is This the World's Oldest Landscape Painting?
The oldest-known landscape painting might have been created in modern-day central Turkey, according to a new study.
Painting
Art
The Persuasive Paintings of a Shamanistic Yenta
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — The idea that a work may be finished before some mysterious visual and artistic calculus is complete tends toward the blasphemous. And, with a shrug of the shoulders, to simply imply that you are finished with a painting or drawing when you don’t want to work on it anymore — well
Art
Painting Beyond Belief: Amy Sillman, Peter Doig, and Jordan Kantor Discuss Chagall
Last Sunday night, on the occasion of the exhibit Chagall: Love, War, and Exile on view at the Jewish Museum, Jordan Kantor a painter and professor at California College of the Arts, hosted an intimate panel looking back at painting since the death of Chagall to the present.
Art
The Forgotten Story of Postwar Art
We know how a handful of painters — Pollock, de Kooning, and company — wrested modernism from the Old World to create a new kind of art, one unmediated, enveloping, and completely frank in its making. Less well-known is the story of how another group of painters, a half-generation later, pursued wit
Art
The New Old Logic of Abstraction
The great thing about the outgrowth of exhibitions showcasing and examining emerging contemporary abstract painting is that the novelty is starting to wear off.
Art
Simon Hantaï’s Discontent
In 1983, at the height of his career, Simon Hantaï (1922–2008), then sixty years old, decided to withdraw from the art scene and stop exhibiting his work, if not to stop painting altogether. He would not show again until 1998, a fifteen-year hiatus and self-imposed silence that echo with more force
Art
Some Thoughts on Clement Greenberg and His Legacy
In his introductory essay to Vitamin P, a survey of contemporary painting first published by Phaidon in 2002, the poet and critic Barry Schwabsky takes pains to point out the variety of stylistic positions available to a contemporary painter. In doing so, Schwabsky suggests that there is no single i
Art
Teaching a Robot to Paint
We're fascinated with robots doing human things, from Elektro chain-smoking its way through the 1939 World's Fair to the Turk automaton that was beating people at chess during the 18th and 19th centuries (there turned out to be a human hiding inside the latter, but still). Now a team at the Universi
News
Rijksmuseum Acquires One of the Earliest Landscapes of America
The Rijksmuseum has acquired one of the earliest depictions of America — a painting by Jan Mostaert from circa 1535 titled "Landscape with an Episode from the Conquest of America."
Art
Waste Not, Want Not: Phillip Allen’s Recent Paintings
DUBLIN — Phillip Allen is an English abstract painter in his mid-forties, whose interest in the material possibilities of his medium — ranging from felt tip pens to oil paint and enamel — informs nearly everything else. He would finish a felt tip pen drawing in one sitting, and then, using the drawi
Art
The Many Faces of Abstraction
Since painters of any stripe, be it abstract or figurative, no longer work around master narratives, trying to tackle one big issue, it’s common to see group shows of abstract painting arranged around particular interests or strategies a select group of artists may share.
Art
More Vibrant Tales of Obsolete Pigments
After our first installment of obsolete pigments, we had such a strong response that we realized we'd only hit the tip of the curious history of vanished colors.