Old Masters

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…

Never made for sale, plein air oil sketches of the late 18th and early 19th centuries have found an astute and scholarly audience that appreciates their greatness. By Sarah E. Fensom Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile, his treatise on education, “Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.” For young painters living…

Ernest Briggs, a California-born New York painter and teacher, charted his own path through abstraction, always exploring and never repeating himself. The notion of a “second-generation Abstract Expressionist” has entered the vocabulary of art history, but it is not very helpful in terms of actually understanding how and why artists created the works they did….

In Eric Aho’s paintings, we enter a mysterious and powerful realm of nature. The search for the sublime in nature, pursued by the Romantics in Northern Europe and the Hudson River School in this country, goes on in the work of Eric Aho. Aho, a 54-year-old New Englander, isn’t a landscape painter in the literal…