Shareby Hasan Niyazi
CARAVAGGIO AND HIS FOLLOWERS IN ROME has arrived at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Those unable to experience the majesty of the Baroque in person are left to ponder the substantial catalogue recently published by Yale University Press.
Featuring essays by exhibition organizers and notable scholars of the Baroque, Michael Fried’s [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Art, Painting on Jul 21st, 2011
ShareLLOYD MARTIN LIVES AND WORKS IN RHODE ISLAND. By no means does that permit anyone to call him a New England painter. There is nothing regional about his painting. His achievement embodies Robert Hughes’ observation—made some twenty years ago—that Manhattan is no longer a creative center. A marketing center, certainly; but vital for the development [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Painting on Jun 29th, 2011
ShareIN MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS of following Paul Resika’s painting, I have yet to see a single flower painting by him. Opening today at Lori Bookstein’s is “Paul Resika: Flowers,” a survey of atypical floral still lifes that begins in the late 1980s and continues into the present. A dozen small scale (22 x 18 [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Art, Art Education, Drawing, Painting on May 1st, 2011
ShareNEW YORK REMAINS A MARKETING CENTER but it has not been a creative center for at least two decades. Robert Hughes was saying as much in the early Eighties. Artists live where they like, where they can afford. They spend just enough occasional time in New York to get to know galleries where their work [...]
Read Full Post »
ShareIt is always interesting to view the work of art critics. Most often, the soul of their criticism—its preferences and loyalties—is encapsulated in their own art. Hedy O’Beil has been a guide to the art world for close to 40 years. She contributed to Arts magazine in its heyday, from 1976 to 1985 when it [...]
Read Full Post »
ShareTHE RESURRECTION, from Matthias Grünwald’s Isenheim altarpiece, is the single most striking image of the event on which Christianity is founded. It dramatizes the center of the Christian mystery—and, correspondingly, the mystery of man. Neil MacGregor—art historian, director of the British Museum, and man of faith—responds to drama of the painting in his Seeing Salvation. [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Art, Art History, Painting, Sacred Art on Apr 22nd, 2011
ShareBy Christopher S. Johnson
AS IT HAS DONE WITH SO MUCH ELSE, contemporary art has largely jettisoned the Christian themes and imagery that defined the Western tradition for centuries. (Those much publicized maestros of toilet media excepted, to be sure.) It came as a mild shock then, on the cusp of Holy Week, to stumble upon [...]
Read Full Post »
ShareBy Christopher S. Johnson
“BE ASSURED MY YOUNG FRIEND, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith wrote to his distraught friend, John Sinclair, after the battle of Saratoga (1777). Smith’s words are a model of equanimity; the defeat would bring French forces into the conflict and effectively decide the outcome of [...]
Read Full Post »
Share“I WANT A SHORT LIFE BUT A FULL ONE.” Amedeo Modigliani got his wish. In 1920, at age thirty-five, he died, toothless, of tubercular meningitis in a Parisian pauper’s hospital.
It was a sordid end to a confident stride into the trenches of la vie maudit. The romance of heroic nonconformity, vital to the cult of [...]
Read Full Post »
ShareDANIEL B. GALLAGHER is an American philosopher and theologian stationed in the Vatican. He is exquisitely placed to pursue interest in aesthetics and, if I can phrase it this way, the intersection of aesthetics and metaphysics. Fr. Gallagher’s specific concerns are the adjoining issues of classical, medieval and modern theories of art and—beginning to assert [...]
Read Full Post »