Impressionism

The late Richard Anuszkiewicz’s work is a rigorous yet joyous exploration of the realm of pure color and form. By John Dorfman The term “Op Art” was invented by a critic, not an artist, and the movement to which it was applied—if movement it was—came and went within a span of about five years in…

John Kiley brings inspiration from conceptual and performance art to his glass-making. By John Dorfman Making glass art is usually a collaborative process, due to its technical demands, but the Covid-19 pandemic forced John Kiley to go it alone. The last time time he blew glass was in early March in the hot shop at…

Juan Gris, a master of the Cubist still life, is getting a closer look thanks to a new museum exhibition. By John Dorfman Juan Gris is often the odd man out in discussions of Cubism, with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at the center and Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger slightly off to stage right…

Fritz Bultman, a first-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, sculptor,and collagist, went his own way and is now coming our way. By John Dorfman The January 15, 1951, issue of Life magazine featured a photograph of 15 American artists. Formally dressed in their best, carefully stage-managed into a group pose, they glared into photographer Nina Leen’s lens…

    An exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao gives occasion to reflect on Kandinsky’s message for the 21st century. By John Dorfman Vasily Kandinsky certainly needs no introduction. More than a century ago, he was one of the first artists to paint abstractly, and his theoretical writings not only explained the meaning of the new…

  The Prado does a deep dive into its collection to come to grips with the situation faced by women artists in fin-de-siècle Spain. By Sarah E. Fensom In late 19th-century Spain, history painting’s stronghold on the state’s interest was supplanted by paintings of social denunciation and the so-called “subjects of the day.” These works…

Annie Lapin’s astonishing canvases take us deep into nature, society, and human perception itself. By John Dorfman Annie Lapin’s paintings are like portals. Step inside, and you find yourself in a disquieting landscape, unfamiliar and yet eerily familiar at the same time. They shimmer with possibilities, almost in a quantum state, to the point that…

An exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts draws attention to the influence of the Arctic on Jean Paul Riopelle, Canada’s greatest postwar artist. By John Dorfman The history of the fascination of Surrealist and abstract artists with the indigenous art of the Arctic is a long one. It starts in the 1930s, when…

Feared moribund by the early 1960s, abstract painting continued to be a lively art in the decades that followed, as demonstrated by a wide-ranging exhibition at the Blanton Museum. By John Dorfman Although arguably all art is abstraction, the idea of painting “abstractly,” that is to say, without creating representations of external objects, dates back…