Americana

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…

“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…

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…

Fantasy Enriches Reality in Magical Paintings by Inka Essenhigh ByLilly Wei Inka Essenhigh has always been a wizard with line. The whiplash fluidity and finesse of her draftsmanship made her an artist to be reckoned with ever since the 1990s, when she was starting out. And what she achieved with it was unique, her own…

Gabriele Münter was a spirited champion of the avant-garde in Germany, a brilliant draftswoman, and a daring colorist ByAshley Busby In a diary entry from 1926, Expressionist painter and artist Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) ruminated on her continued position on the periphery of the art world, noting: “In the eyes of many, I was nothing but…

The Met Considers the Intertwined Lives of Manet and Degas in an Exhibition Organized in Conjunction with the Musée d’Orsay By Sarah Bochicchio Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) met for the first time in the grand gallery of the Musée du Louvre. It was the early 1860s; both artists were in their late…

From its beginnings to Abstract Expressionism and beyond, the work of James Brooks is reassessed at the Parrish Art Museum by Lilly Wei While James Brooks was one of the pioneering first-wave Abstract Expressionists who settled in the South Fork of Long Island long before it became synonymous with the “One Percent,” he is now…

Lavinia Fontana, a Bolognese painter of the Cinquecento, broke barriers for women artists all while demonstrating extraordinary talent by Ashley Busby An exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland, “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker” (on view through August 27th), highlights the groundbreaking achievements of a lesser-known, late Cinquecento painter from Bologna.  To be certain, Fontana…

A New Exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of Art Reexamines American Painting as It Confronted the Modern World and Modern Art by James D. Balestrieri After having a glance at the images of the artworks on the pages of this essay, you would be forgiven for flipping back to the title of the featured exhibition,…