What Meets the Eye

Wrestling, in the Dark, with Delacroix

January 8, 2019

Delacroix does not “do it for me.” Btw, have you heard “Lord, Do It For Me,” with its increasingly fervent request? The James Cleveland version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daKpXBT6vyA However, he did it for Van Gogh and other [...]

Nathaniel Mary Quinn: Family Portraits

November 8, 2018

There is so much manipulated or copied photographic content in the galleries these days that I’ve begun to ignore it. I have even begun to wonder if artists are so happy in their studios sifting through the internet that Plato’s Allegory of the [...]

Malcolm Morley: the First and the Last

November 5, 2018

Cristoforo… is not literally Morley’s first work. It was painted in 1966, after a correspondence art course (from prison), the Camberwell School of Art and the RCA and also after he had moved [...]

Rackstraw Downes: A Peek Behind the Curtain and Perspective (almost) without Orthogonal Lines

October 16, 2018

So, a raw sienna underpainting, possibly with a touch of burnt umber ? —scrubbed or is it scumbled onto the canvas, a grid of pencil lines—unfinished? A study or was it just so beautiful as is that Downes decided to leave it and show it—with [...]

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 [...]