What Meets the Eye

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 [...]

The Early Work Now: Romare Bearden and Robert Motherwell

October 22, 2017

It was coincidence that I saw these two shows within days of each other: the following remarks are kind of coincidental as well. That the early work leads to the later work is a given, but it’s also true that the late work leads to [...]

Finding Fairfield Porter at the Met

September 19, 2017

The painter who looks for a subject, or doubts his role, has fallen behind in the race. —Fairfield Porter Because I was doubting my role and looking for a subject in the last days of summer—I visited the Met. And by subject I mean literal [...]

“Renoir, my Father” by Jean Renoir

September 4, 2017

I never used to like Renoir. I suppose I agreed with Degas (who I now find is an anti-Semite—and Renoir too, oh well, a little more about that later)—who called his style “as puffy as cotton wool.” This memoir by his son Jean, the [...]