Indian Art

From AbEx to Space X, six decades of Held’s heroic abstractions reconsidered by Lilly Wei Al Held is having a moment—again. Best known for his punchy, hard-edged geometric abstractions, often prodigiously scaled, Held was always a contender in the New York art world (and beyond) although his work never quite received the critical acclaim it…

Artist Jeffrey Gibson’s work is a radical evaluation of self and history that imagines an Indigenous future by Ashley Busby In April, a celebratory performance enlivened the forecourt of the United States Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.  A gathering of bold, red, columnar forms served as a muti-tiered stage interspersed with Indigenous musicians.  In…

Eileen Agar’s Surrealism and Storytelling by Sarah Bochicchio “My life is a collage,” writes Eileen Agar (1899–1991) in the first chapter of her autobiography, A Look at My Life. The metaphor is particularly apt for the surrealist artist—and not just because collage was a key medium in her oeuvre. In her writings, Agar lays out…

Norman Carton: from Ukraine to Philadelphia to New York, bridging Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism by William Corwin  At age 10, in 1918, Norman Carton and his mother were in hiding during pogroms unleashed by the Russian revolution; six years later the same boy found himself safe and sound in Philadelphia, rescued from Eastern Europe by the…

Charting the path of a modern master by William Corwin Gilot’s line is the first thing you notice, her tool for expressing an image.  In her portraits in pencil, the line becomes the central element, almost tattooed into the paper.  In her paintings, both figurative and abstract, Gilot’s line acts either as a boundary of…

American artists on the move at mid-century by Lilly Wei There was an epochal transition in the years immediately after World War II as the center of the art world, a position held by Paris for at least a century, pivoted to New York. The shift had begun earlier, as such shifts do, the ravages…

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…

  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 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…