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Sculpture
Visionary Physics
Mildred Thompson: A visionary abstract painter who used String Theory to illuminate the human condition By William Corwin Mildred Thompson’s paintings “were the children of her age,” to paraphrase the famous opening line of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910): the nuclear age, the space age, as well as the civil rights era. Born in…
Summer of Color
Nine weeks that upended French Art By Lilly Wei It was July 1905 in Collioure, a quaint French fishing village sandwiched between the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean and the slopes of the Pyrenees located about half a marathon’s run from Catalonia and the Spanish border. Henri Matisse invited André Derain to meet him…
Dutch Masters
Dutch Art Helps Shape the Western World’s View of Itself By James D. Balestrieri The six themes that comprise Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an exhibition on view April 19th through July 14th at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, convey a complex story of a very…
Re-framing Perle Fine
One of the founders of Abstract Expressionism is finally getting the recognition she deserves By William Corwin Imagine the atmosphere of a crowded and murmurous second-floor loft on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village in 1949: smoky and smelling not a little bit of unwashed clothes, Ballantine Ale, and whiskey. It was a raucous, chaotic atmosphere,…
Radical Clay
Into the Spotlight: Contemporary Japanese Women Ceramists By Lilly Wei Clay, like many materials formerly relegated to the less acclaimed echelons of craft, at least in the United States, has risen in esteem of late, as have other so-called minor arts. There are more exhibitions dedicated to it, and clay appears more often as part…
The Power of Paper
A new exhibition explores Mark Rothko’s works on paper, revaluing an unappreciated medium By Ashley Busby Too often an artist becomes synonymous with that thing that cements their status, leaving a one-sided glimpse into an evolving career. For Mark Rothko (1903–1970), his expressive color field paintings, towering in presence and moodily centered in pure washes…
Paint Every Mountain
Yoo Youngkuk, celebrated at home as a groundbreaking modernist painter, is having his first solo exhibition outside South Korea By Lilly Wei Yoo Youngkuk once said that he used the mountain as his principal motif because it contained everything that was needed in painting: color, straight and curved lines, and light. Like Cézanne, he treated…
Reason and Imagination
“The Hub of the World,” a New Exhibition at New York’s Nicholas Hall, Explores 18th-Century Rome’s Rich Cultural Ferment By James D. Balestrieri It’s hard to imagine a time when the Settecento, as the 18th century in Rome is often termed, wasn’t at least an occasional subject of interest to museums and art historians. In…
Visions of Life
Pierre Bonnard produced compositions rooted in the places and spaces of his life that exist as a shimmering resonance of memory By Ashley Busby In an over five-decade career, artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) reveled in the ordinary, painting the environs of his everyday life. Never without a sketchbook, the artist was known for his daily…