Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Impressionism
The Man Without Guile
For Henri Rousseau, naïveté was a powerful artistic technique. By Jonathon Keats According to a popular story, Henri Rousseau became an artist on account of a prank played by the absurdist writer Alfred Jarry. Rousseau was on duty as a gabelou at the Pont des Arts in Paris, collecting tolls for the municipal government, when…
The Red and the Black
By Dan Hofstadter Mark Rothko insisted that his contemplative art was the stuff of high drama. Why? Mark Rothko liked to hold forth. As a listener, you may have found his harangues enlightening, infuriating or “banal,” as Clement Greenberg did, but never funny. They weren’t stand-up. Yet the chief virtue of Red, John Logan’s play…
Traditions and Transgressions
By Aline Brandauer In Santa Fe, contemporary art moves forward in conversation with the past. In a place as saturated with diverse artistic traditions as New Mexico, the creative process is bound to involve a complex dialogue with the past. Absorbing Native American, Spanish and Anglo-American influences, New Mexico’s cultural producers cannot escape tradition; they…
Finders, Sleepers
By Sallie Brady Leveraging luck and sleuthing skills, savvy dealers discover hidden treasures. Miscatalogued, overpainted, lost amid the ephemera of a pokey country auction—a hidden masterpiece is the holy grail of every any good art and antiques dealer. It’s the fantasy that keeps them awake nights, the dream that their hunch on a “could it…
The Rest is Noise
The Futurist Luigi Russolo was a lousy painter, but as a composer he was way ahead of his time. Reminiscing in the late 1950s, Igor Stravinsky recalled an evening in 1915 when he first heard the Futurist music of Luigi Russolo. “Five phonographs standing on five tables in a large and otherwise empty room emitted digestive noises, static, etc.,” he said. “I pretended to be enthusiastic and told [the Futurists] that the sets of five phonographs with such music, mass produced, would surely sell like Steinway grand pianos.”
A Woman of Valor
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.
Help Wanted
In the old days, most directors of major art museums could settle in and look forward to decades-long tenures. The job was unique and prestigious—the qualifications were a background of serious scholarship as a curator and the ability to be a reassuring pillar of the community—if a little sleepy at times. Fast forward to 2010: Museum directors are hustling more than they ever had dreamed they would have to, grappling with the perils of the Great Recession and with increasing demands on their time.
Otherworldly Masquerade
There is something inherently uncanny about masks. The placement of a false face over a real face, the displacement of identity, the fixed expression, all conspire to unsettle or even frighten the beholder. The sense of the weird is especially strong in masks that were intended to represent unearthly beings and to allow humans to temporarily assume the identity of denizens of the spirit world during religious or magical ceremonies.
A Haunting Humanism
Nearly 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.
Subscribe to Art & Antiques for your Digital copy!
