Old Masters

Never a household name, Herman Cherry produced abstractions featuring gestural color on par with his New York School peers. By Ashely Busby Artist Herman Cherry (1909–1992) experienced but also relished the struggle inherent in creative life. In conversation with critic Judd Tully, the artist compared his own path toward abstraction as an arduous journey. He…

  The late Expressionist painter shows us how geometry can be as spirited as gesture by Lilly Wei Katherine Porter died this past April at the age of 82 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A month before, the unflaggingly productive painter had an exhibition in Santa Fe at the LewAllen Galleries aptly titled “Brilliance of…

Museums celebrate 150 years of Impressionism by Ruth Lopez “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, celebrates the 150th anniversary of the first impressionist exhibition. Of all the origin stories that exist in the field of art history, the birth of Impressionism…

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…