A truly beautiful exhibition is showing at the recently redesigned Morgan Library. I didn’t know much about Saul Steinberg (1914–1999), besides his iconic 1976 New Yorker cover, “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” But the show — and Steinberg’s talent — go well beyond funny cartoons and pretty drawings.
It brings a less known perspective to some of the 20th century’s most complex themes: imperialism, our obsessions with money, our ability to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to suffering. It is one of the most touching, effective shows I’ve seen this year. It’s so unaffected, and the new Morgan is really a beautiful space, full of light and warmth. (more…)
How do painters create feeling and expression from inanimate objects—mere paint and canvas? We tend to think of such animating magic in masks from Africa or Papua New Guinea, donned by shamanic figures in rituals and dances. But to paraphrase one of my art professors from undergraduate school: Even while looking at a genuinely moving Rembrandt painting, in the end, you’re just looking at colored dirt.
Maybe the key to seeing art, and indeed becoming an artist, lays hidden in childhood. Educational psychologists have shown that young children go through a developmental stage of animism. In their eyes, inanimate objects seem alive. Think of a time when you genuinely wondered if the man in the moon was real, and felt a hushed thrill watching the animated broomsticks in Disney’s Fantasia. (more…)
Last summer, French billionaire François Pinault began scattering some highlights of his massive contemporary art collection in and around Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, which he now owns. There, on a platform in the Grand Canal, stood Jeff Koons’s giant magenta balloon dog, while the courtyard was temporarily paved in the 1,296 metal plates of Carl Andre’s “37th Piece of Work.” One wonders how Peggy Guggenheim, who despised Pop art, would have reacted to the pair of puckish figures by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami that presided like cartoon conquerors over the City of Water. (more…)
I made it to La Gran Manzana last weekend and … Peter Schjeldahl is such a pushover these days!
On Feb. 4, I wrote about two stellar reviews for a retrospective currently up at the American Folk Art Museum of the self-taught painter Martin Ramirez. The exhibition features hundreds of Ramirez’s works spread over three floors. (more…)
With acid-free paper, glass and wood frames, art lasts. When art doesn’t preserve itself, it’s usually a cautionary tale. Consider Leonardo’s experimental and ultimately ruinous paint recipe for the Battle of Anghiari—his lost and oft-lamented mural. But when do artists create pieces that aren’t meant to last? In the United States, only arcane examples come immediately to mind, such as the sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt at the steamy 1904 World’s Fair, made entirely out of butter. And there’s performance art, too; an artist once played a violin on a New York City street corner, wearing ice skates on melting blocks of ice. (more…)
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