Posted in Art on Oct 14th, 2010
ShareONCE UPON A TIME, culture was understood as an activity, a nexus of rituals and shared understandings, which enables us to live more fully. Now, it is just a lot of stuff for sale.
Five years ago, James Salomon stepped down as director of Mary Boone Gallery to found his own shop, Salomon Contemporary Warehouse, [...]
Posted in Art, Art Education, Art History, Things to Read on Oct 12th, 2010
ShareERIC HEBBORN CAME TO A HARD END, his skull mysteriously smashed in on a Roman alley in 1996. Quite possibly the world’s greatest art forger, he was the hand behind innumerable works once attributed to artists as varied as Brueghel, Piranesi, Pontormo, Corot and Augustus John, among others.
Born in London, he studied at The Royal [...]
Posted in Art, Art Education, Things to Read on Oct 11th, 2010
ShareWILL YOUR FIRSTBORN RUIN HER CHANCES of getting into Yale if she cuts her baby teeth on picture books? What good are the plastic letters on her teething ring if you let her linger with picture books? Shouldn’t she be weaned onto prose—long and winding prose—as early as possible? What future is there for a [...]
Posted in Art, Things to Read on Oct 8th, 2010
ShareJERRY PINKNEY IS A NATIONAL TREASURE. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, his children’s book illustrations offer artists more food than the ritual tours of Chelsea. Implicit in the beauty of his work (sometimes commissioned on behalf of less distinguished texts) and the decency that informs it, is more culture than in whole square blocks [...]
Posted in Art, Art History on Oct 5th, 2010
ShareWITHIN THE PAST WEEK, an Italian web site posted online six glories of Renaissance painting from the Uffizi; another three from Milan, Rome and a church in the Piedmont; plus one late 19th century Italian peasant scene. As you can guess from the name of the site (Haltadefinizione), all ten can be viewed in extreme [...]
Posted in Art, Art Writing, Painting, Things to Read on Oct 1st, 2010
ShareMan with a Blue Scarf
On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud
by Martin Gayford
Thames & Hudson, 256 pp., $40
Art critics have been sitting for their portraits since Diderot, grandaddy of modern criticism, modeled for Fragonard. Under 18th-century Prussian rigor, aesthetics hardened into a discipline. Critics arose as arbiters and exegetes. The benefits [...]
Posted in Art, Environmental Piety, Painting on Sep 29th, 2010
ShareENVIRONMENTAL PIETY IS A LARGE COMPONENT of contemporary artists’ interest in landscape. Artists announce their state of grace by genuflecting to the forms and ecosystems of the natural world. This displacement of religious impulses onto nature—Mother Mary, dressed in green—is seconded even by the churches. Think of the altar to Gaia in New York’s Cathedral [...]
ShareNEW YORK REMAINS A MARKET TOWN but it is increasingly hard to call it a creative center. Even what comes to market tends to cluster around the contemporary commonplaces that clog Chelsea and its satellite on the Lower East Side. Much good work is exhibited outside the official precincts. If you can make it to [...]
ShareTHE LOVELINESS OF JOHNNIE WINONA ROSS’ paintings elude translation into either reproduction or verbal description. Their latticed structure reproduces but not the subtleties of the guiding hand behind it. Compositional clarity and order can be conveyed only at the cost of intimacy with the small, exquisite freedoms that loosen the architecture to let in air [...]
SharePRICK HUNDREDS OF CONTEMPORARY PAINTINGS and the air goes out of them. Prick a fine botanical and it bleeds. With Derrick Guild’s florilegium of oversized, counterfeit botanical paintings, a prick gets you a some of both: a little blood and a bit more air than is needed. Blood is the best part.
The lifeblood of historical [...]