What Meets the Eye

Summer is not over until 9/23! : A Time Before We Were Born: Visions of Arcadia in Contemporary Painting

September 19, 2018

Do we still dream of Arcadia? A secluded pastoral idyll, idly herding goats and playing the pipes invented by Pan—and Arcadia invented Pan (really). We could frolic with the fauns and the nymphs in an unspoiled mountain forest. In Arcadia, life is [...]

Painting Now and Forever III (but not if it goes on like this!)

August 22, 2018

Such a pity that— https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/in_depth/how-to-write-a-negative-reviewand-why-its-so-hard-to-publish-one-55558?ty=thankyou —just when “Painting Forever III” shows how urgently they are needed. [...]

Jenny Saville’s “Ancestors” Dissected

July 11, 2018

The brilliant analysis that I had planned to offer has already been covered—and then some!—by a think tank organized by David Cohen: Jenny Saville ROUNDTABLE: Julie Heffernan, Brenda Zlamany, Dennis Kardon, Walter Robinson, Barry Schwabsky, and [...]

Mildred Thompson: Outer/Inner Space

May 26, 2018

The first thing that happened was that my gaze was arrested by the relatively overworked white circular spiraling shape with a trompe l’oeil shadow in the center right. Then I recognized it as an effort to get something exactly right—and [...]

Anselm Kiefer and Leon Golub: Separate and Together at The Met Breuer

April 27, 2018

I don’t usually peg artists to their race and gender unless they make a big deal out of it themselves. As in this case they do, I’ll say that the Kiefer and Golub shows occurring simultaneously (by chance or design?) have much to tell us about [...]

Per Kirkeby and the Lenhard Effect

March 28, 2018

These paintings and Abstract Expressionism share a painterly vocabulary and have nothing else in common. It’s disconcerting even now, when gestural painting is often figurative, to see how precise Kirkeby’s work is. It is based on direct [...]

Gulliver’s Travels: Visiting ILIJA BOSILJ BAŠIČEVIČ, among others

February 27, 2018

Being of “an active and restless nature,” I undertook a voyage to Brobdingnag– aka Chelsea. The natives appeared to be more or less human-sized and to find me unremarkable (or perhaps did not even notice my [...]

Mind the Gap: Chuck Close on the Q at 86th St

February 14, 2018

(Yes I am commenting about Close’s # MeToo moment –but at the end.) What the hell? Why is this station so big? It would have been perfect at La Guardia or JFK. And what with the signal failures and other delays, few will want to make a special [...]

Brett de Palma and Newton’s Laws of Motion

December 19, 2017

The sensation of being pushed away from a rotating axis, popularly called “centrifugal force,” is a delusion; what you are actually experiencing is your own inertia. Something to think about when encountering the spinning top that is Brett de [...]

Robert Longo Blew Me Away at The Brooklyn Museum

November 28, 2017

I was at the Brooklyn Museum and dutifully considering the important pictures and histories, the artists’/museums’ role in raising social and political issues, “proof”, facts, when… Poof! A rabbit popped out of a hat with [...]