This month, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, which originated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall, comes to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. With a broad selection of works, some of them never before shown, and a series of installations that demonstrate Gorky’s work process, the exhibition illuminates the development of the artist’s unique style.
Continue reading...Modern & Postwar
A Haunting Humanism
June 2010Nearly a century ago, much of Europe waited with trepidation for war to break out. In August 1914, the conflagration that would become World War I finally erupted, and the German artist Otto Dix was one young volunteer who eagerly headed to the front. An avid reader of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher who had championed an ideal “superman” or “overman” who would overcome the limitations of mere humanity as it had evolved thus far, Dix would soon find his illusions shattered.
Continue reading...Walking Into History
April 2010It was a thrilling victory, but a narrow one. Once the currency conversions were worked out, it was clear that Alberto Giacometti’s L’homme qui marche I (Walking Man I), offered at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 3, had made history, fetching £65 million, or $104.3 million, to claim the title of “most expensive artwork sold at auction” from Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe (Boy With a Pipe), a 1905 painting that fetched $104.1 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2004.
Continue reading...Talking Pictures: Sons, Fathers and Forefathers
January 2010In his new book, Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock (Bloomsbury, $35), Henry Adams, a professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University, challenges the received wisdom about these two great 20th-century painters—one, the foremost exponent of American Regionalism; the other, the mysterious genius of Abstract Expressionism
Continue reading...Essay: Reinhardt’s Heart
December 2009Some four decades after his death at the age of 53, Ad Reinhardt remains an enigmatic figure. His famous “black paintings,” which he produced toward the end of his life, are still some of the most mysterious creations ever made in the long, multifaceted history of modern art. As a teacher, Reinhardt propagated the idea of “art as art.” (“Art is art,” he wrote. “Everything else is everything else.”)
Continue reading...Exhibitions: In the House
November 2009During its relatively short life, the Bauhaus school was the site of thousands of conversations and experiments in which artists, designers and architects came together to collectively decide what contemporary art should be.
Continue reading...The Thinker
November 2009In September 1931, Alexandre Kojève addressed a letter to his uncle, painter Vasily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract art, comparing his capacity to continually discover new forms to Picasso’s. “But unlike him, you never allow yourself the role of ham actor,” quipped Kojève, a Russian emigré philosopher living in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne.
Continue reading...From Russia with Love
November 2009The Taos School of painting is known for its part-academic, part-modernistic depictions of a startlingly beautiful landscape and for its celebration of the picturesque qualities of New Mexico’s indigenous people. It often takes the unjaded eye of an outsider to see a place this way, and in fact, none of the Taos painters were actually from Taos (see Art & Antiques, Summer 2009).
Continue reading...Dream Weavers
September 2009Until April 2010 you can see Guernica in London, at the newly expanded Whitechapel Gallery. But if you’ve visited the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and seen Picasso’s anguished portrayal of the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, you might notice something a bit odd. At 10 by 22 feet, the Guernica in London is slightly smaller than the one in Spain and considerably heavier (the gallery needed six men to hang it).
Continue reading...Golden Days
July 2009“Summer and its blossoms all winter in California.” Around the turn of the 20th century the United States Railroad Administration put slogans like this on thousands of travel posters, hoping to cash in on Americans’ desire to escape the cold, harsh winters of the Northeast and Midwest. But artists didn’t need slogans to entice them.
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