In the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism developed as an aesthetically pure style, stripped of the political content of 1930s Depression-era art, memorably dismissed by Arshile Gorky as “Poor art for poor people.” That attitude persisted until a counter-reaction set...
In Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man,” we meet a small, strange creature lurking on the narrator’s stairway and in his foyer. No animal, but a spool affixed to wooden crosspieces and trailing bits of thread, it’s a “broken-down remnant” composed of scraps, an...
The term forbidden fruit nowadays refers to mere guilty pleasures, but it once designated the fatal, tragic fruit of knowledge—knowledge of sex, or course, being a discovery that every generation makes defiantly, with mingled trepidation and delight. Chris Antemann’s...
The endless deluge of photographs from digital cameras—one trillion photos were taken in 2015—seems to have made everyone in the online world both a photographer and photo consumer, with mixed results. Lauren Marsolier, living in Los Angeles, and Rachelle Bussieres,...
Two hundred years ago, the hierarchy of subjects taught to academic painters placed history and mythology at the top, with landscape and still life at the bottom. This ranking followed the scala naturae, the ladder or scale of nature derived from Plato: God, followed...
Two Bay Area artists, the sculptor/painter/collagist Bella Feldman and the draftsman (for lack of a better term) Ron Weil, show that intelligence, passion and craftsmanship are as timely as ever.Feldman, whose 50-year retrospective at Richmond Art Center in 2013 was...
It’s been said that the first half of the 20th century was Picasso’s and the second half, Duchamp’s. The transition from modernist painting to today’s mixed-media conceptualism is in large part due to a 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show...
In 1955, the 31-year-old Swiss photographer Robert Frank went looking for America, driving 10,000 miles across 30 states, in a kind of photographic enactment of Jack Kerouac’s beat novel, On the Road. If the novel functions today as a rite of passage for disaffected...
New York sculptor Leonardo Drew’s dark and somewhat foreboding constructions of thousands of pieces of wood might seem oppressive, were it not for his elegant forms and subtle wit. Eight wall-hung sculptural assemblages (all works 2014) strongly make the case for art...
Americans who know Cuba only through movies (God-father 2, Before Night Falls) and familiarity with a few star Cuban artists (Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta) are guilty of the oxymoron of mainland insularity, a product of Cold War tensions that arose in 1959 with the...
As the George Clooney character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? comically declared, “We in a tight spot!” With 7 billion people competing for ever-scarcer natural resources in an environment beset by weather changes, Homo sapiens is headed for challenges, and not of the...
Dorothea Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, set designer, writer and poet who died last year at the age of 101. Best known for her enigmatic works of the 1940s and 1950s, which feature women and girls involved with strange animals and animated swaths of...
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