It’s time we had a talk about Damien Hirst. I know, I know. Mr. Hirst, who was born in 1965 and came to prominence in the London art scene of the late 1980s as the first among equal of the Young British Artists, has for so long been ascending to the kind of fame perversely Read More
Gabriel Orozco, the Mexican-born international art star whose mid-career retrospective is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, is by general consent one of the leading artists of the global biennial age.
Since the early 1990s, Mr. Orozco has created a body of conceptually driven art of ad hoc form that reliably adds Read More
In 1969, the artist Bruce Nauman made Pacing Upside Down, a 56-minute single-frame film of the artist crazily astride his California studio: a portrait of the artist as a convict in his cage. It was an extreme act of art that became foundational—inaugurating a shift in style from American abstract painting and Pop to post-Minimalism, Read More
A curious obscurity clings to Man Ray, the transatlantic dandy who died in 1976 at the age of 87. Nobody could call him overlooked, exactly. The artist is enshrined in art history as the first American to gain membership to deluxe avant-garde circles of Surrealism and Dada. Several of Man Ray’s works, like Le Violon Read More
At the age of 72, the artist David Hockney has few living competitors for the public’s affection. Mr. Hockney’s is a household name in England, where he is by common consent the nation’s most popular artist, but also in American households, at least the ones with a Matisse poster hanging in the kitchen. More than Read More
"Nexus New York: Latin / American Artists in the Modern Metropolis,” the inaugural exhibition at the recently refurbished El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, takes on a set of artists apart from the familiar high-modernist view of New York. (Imagine Broadway Boogie Woogie scored to the mambo.) That no such show has been attempted Read More
Lincoln and New York,” the ambitious and generally excellent exhibition now running at the New-York Historical Society through March 25, is one to make an American proud. New Yorkers, on the other hand, may walk away despairing on the side of the hometown team. Organized by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer and a team of curators, Read More
"Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’” at the Metropolitan Museum is one of the best shows of photography in years. It is not a complete retrospective. It concentrates on the years 1955 though ’57, when the Swiss-born photographer drove cross-country on a Guggenheim grant on a three-legged, 10,000-mile trip that took him from New York Read More
Nothing entrances the painting lover like the work of Vermeer. At the time of Vermeer’s early death, at the age of 43, in 1675, the silent Dutchman—silent because he left behind no writing, or even an identifiable self-portrait, and because most of his work is supremely un-rhetorical—had painted more than a dozen all time masterpieces. Read More
The past couple of years have proved a weird, overstressed time for art, and weirder still for those of us trying to keep score at home. In New York, vast numbers of artists make a vast quantity of new work, which is, in turn, packaged, displayed, expounded on, sold and trucked off to memory’s landfill Read More
That there should still be, in 2009, degrees of neglect, blind spots, half-forgotten stars in an artistic movement as heavily studied and with as many ardent followers as Abstract Expressionism may be a surprise. But the artist Jack Tworkov certainly belongs in the last category.
Born in Biala, Poland, in 1900, the artist emigrated to Read More
"Focus: Oksar Kokoschka” at the Neue Galerie comes right on time.
The Viennese Expressionist, who died in 1980 at the age of 94, was one of the shattered visionaries of early-20th-century Modernism—a man on the edge. Underappreciated since his death, despite some big-bucks acquisitions of Expressionist masters and periodic museum treatment (a 2002 show Read More
I am only guessing here, but the memorial show for artist Dash Snow on display at Deitch Projects on Grand Street is as likely as not to be remembered as a send-off to the youth craze that has seized the art world this decade.
More legend than man, and dead at 27, Dash Snow’s trajectory Read More
“Hurvin Anderson: Peter’s Series 2007-09” at the Studio Museum in Harlem is the British artist’s first one man show at an American museum, and it is terrific.
This is not a surprise. The museum is often canny at hitting a perfect ratio of quality to art-world visibility. This includes the large spirited group shows Read More
James McNeil Whistler (1834-1903) is the poison-tipped flower in the hothouse of American art. A publicity crazed poseur fired by self-fictions and “art-for-art’s-sake” ambition, he was naturally a dandy, a serial dater of actresses and artist’s models. But he was also a mama’s boy who fell out with everyone who knew him, except his mother, Read More
