Old Masters

Charles Biederman, influential in the abstract art world of 1930s New York, spent the last 60 years of his career in rural Minnesota, relentlessly pursuing his own direction and artistic philosophy. By John Dorfman It’s hard to imagine in these days of constant marketing and hype, but there used to be artists who resigned from…

The Met spans the globe to reveal the unruly vastness of the Surrealist experiment over an eight-decade period. By John Dorfman According to a once-standard narrative, the Surrealist movement began in France in the early 1920s, flourished in Europe and to a lesser extent in the U.S. until World War II, and then petered out…

An exhibition in Paris puts a large number of Botticelli paintings on view and delves deeply into the Quattrocento artist’s role as master of a workshop. By Sarah E. Fensom Sandro Botticelli, a Florentine painter known for his fluidity of line and profound sense of elegant beauty, was also an enterprise. The latter role is…

A unique two-museum retrospective invites a thorough reconsideration of the meaning of Jasper Johns’ work. By John Dorfman Jasper Johns, at 91, is the ranking member of the contemporary American art world. In the words of the New York Times, he is nothing less than “America’s foremost living artist.” In the late 1950s, Johns was…

The impact of ghosts and the spirit world on American art is explored in depth in a highly unusual museum exhibition By John Dorfman The United States has the reputation of being a hard-headedly rationalistic, materialistic nation, but in fact, Americans have been ghost-obsessed from colonial days down to the present time. The harsh conditions…

A new exhibition in The National Gallery of Art’s Cabinet Galleries provides an expanded view of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting. By Sarah E. Fensom In the second volume of his sweeping art-historical compendium The Lives of the Painters (1969), John Canaday includes a chapter titled “Vermeer and the Quietest Revolution.” “Of all the contrasts…

Joan Mitchell prevailed in the male-dominated midcentury art world, creating epic canvases in which light and color transmit powerful emotions. By John Dorfman In a 1986 interview with the art historian Linda Nochlin, Joan Mitchell said, with characteristic don’t-give-a-damn humor, “I call myself a ‘lady painter’ and AEOH—Abstract Expressionist Old Hat.” Of course, with regard…

The extremely diverse art practice of Sophie Taeuber-Arp is at long last getting the serious consideration it deserves, in a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. By Sarah E. Fensom For the Swiss polymath Sophie Taeuber-Arp, abstraction was square one. Unlike most of her colleagues in Europe’s early 20th-century avant-garde, Taeuber-Arp didn’t begin…

The Italian port city of Genoa, rich from trade and finance, played host to a century and half’s worth of Baroque art creativity. By John Dorfman The art of Genoa has been a well-kept secret. Many of the greatest works are in palazzi and villas, in the form of frescoes created for private enjoyment. Most…