Contents
The Fallacy of Art Appreciation
Is art as good for us as it is popularly presumed to be?
Innocence as a Political Tool
9/11 Through Young Eyes at DC Moore Gallery
Modern Martyr
A review of Meryle Secrest’s Modigliani: A Life
Objects
of Devotion
and Desire
From medieval relics
to contemporary art
at Hunter College
Three Faiths,
One Hymnal
Historic manuscripts
and printed texts at
the
New York Public Library
Lucien Freud, the Real Thing? Really?
A review of Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud
by Martin Gayford
Storm King at Fifty
The permanent collection + anniversary installations
Myth as history at the Museum of Biblical Art
Lynette Wallworth’s video installation at Lincoln Center
Paris, Redux
“Americans in Paris: Abstract Painting in the Fifties” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery
Botanical Eden
Rare botanical prints and drawings from the Caribbean in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Gardens.
Not a Footnote Anymore
Cecilia Beaux at The High Museum, Atlanta
Three Briefs
Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart; Susan Sykes at Bernaducci-Meisel, Joanne Mattera at OK Harris
Easy Pleasure
Wolf Kahn’s pastels at Ameringer & Yohe
Sensibility Reigns
Modern and contemporary collage at Pavel Zoubok Gallery; Roland Kulla’s bridgescapes at George Billis Gallery
The Spirit of the Thing
Tribal Art at Betty Cuningham Gallery
A Feast of Malfeasance
“Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception” at Bruce Museum
Bound by Time
Joseph Cornell and Jirì Kolàr at Pavel Zoubok, Arden Scott at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
Division of Labor
Italian Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism at the Guggenheim Museum
Light and Shadow
Ethiopian sacred art at the Museum of Biblical Art
Gifted Nonconformity
Ten years at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; Derrick Guild at Allan Stone Gallery
Out to Lunch, Again
Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” in perpetuity at the Brooklyn Museum
A Painterly Controversy
The paintings of William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri and their students at the Bruce Museum
Material Witnesses
Jane Susan Walp at Tibor de Nagy Gallery; John Morra at Hirschl & Adler Modern
The Body as Raw Material
“Photography and the Self: the Legacy of F. Holland Day” at the Whitney
Winter Trio
Laurie Fendrich at Katherina Rich Perlow; Alice Federico at George Billis Gallery, Makoto Fujimura at Sara Tecchia Roma
Bodies Tumbling After the Fall
Kiki Smith’s 25-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Paris As It Never Was
“Americans in Paris” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Nothing Left to Hide
“Why the Nude?” at the Art Students League; Jacob Collins’ nudes at Hirschl & Adler
And Then There Was Light
The art and collection of James A. Suydam at the National Academy Museum
The Stockholder Code
Jessica Stockholder at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Painting the City
Cityscapes at George Billis Gallery
Illuminating the Word
The St. John’s Bible at the Museum of Biblical Art
Landscape Enlivened / Collage Tamed
Contemporary landscape painting at Lohin Geduld Gallery; Ten years of collage at Pavel Zoubok Gallery
Cruel Aesthetes
Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings at the Metropolitan Museum
A Radical Postal Clerk
Arnold Friedman at Hollis Taggart Galleries; Bruce Gagnier at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; Ed Musante at Paul Thiebaud Gallery
A Pioneer & A Wizard of Proportion
Arthur Dove’s watercolors at Alexandre Gallery; Sal Federico at George Billis Gallery
New York’s Uneasy Modernist
Max Weber’s Still Lifes at Gerald Peters Gallery
Matter-of-Fact Still Lifes & The Last Man Standing
Victor Pesce at Elizabeth Harris Gallery; Charles Seliger at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
A Rare and Joyeous Alchemy
Fred Otnes at Reece Galleries; Selina Trieff at George Billis Gallery; Peter Hoffer at Kathryn Markel Fine Art
Secularizing the Sacred
Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source by Ori Z. Soltes. Westview Press, $29.95.
Rouault’s Anguished World
“Miserere et Guerre” at the Musueum of Biblical Art
The Extraordinary is Everywhere
Fairfield Porter at Betty Cuningham Gallery; Tim Kennedy at First Street Gallery; Tula Telfair at Forum Gallery
Stories to Tell
The Golden Age of Illustration at the Dahesh Museum
O Beautiful, for Spacious Skies
Frederic Edwin Church’s paintings from Olana plus a private Hudson River School collection
Beauty, Price and Provenance
"Home and Abroad: Landscape Painting in France and Italy 1780-1860" at Salander-O’Reilly’s new digs.
Worshipping at the Altar of Minimalism
Maria Elena González at Knoedler & Co., Henry Rothman’s collages at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.
A Trendy Dead End
Christopher Winter at Salander-O’Reilly
Can Barbarians Have Good Taste?
Review of “What Good are the Arts?” by John Carey
Fin-de-Siècle Europhile Painting
American Tonalism at Spanierman Gallery
Painting by Other Means
Collages by Lance Letscher at Howard Scott Gallery and Mario Naves at Elizabeth Harris.
The Romanticism of Flowers
Paintings and prints by Pierre-Joseph Redouté at the New York Botanical Society
The Radically Mundane
Charles Burchfield at DC Moore Gallery; Robert Henri at Gerald Peters Gallery; Elizabeth O’Reilly and Maryam Amiryani at George Billis Gallery
Gilding the Lily
David Milne watercolors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Figure: Expressionist Classicism
John Graham at Allan Stone Gallery; Alan Feltus at Forum Gallery
Myth vs. Reality
Magdalena Abakanowicz at Marlborough; plus Helen Miranda Wilson’s first exhibited abstractions at DC Moore
Marks of Distinction
Two hundred years of drawings and watercolors from the Hood Museum at the National Academy Museum
Homer and the French Academy
“The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the Ecole Nationale Superiure des Beaux Arts, Paris” at the Dahesh and at Princeton
Cityscapes, Whimsy and Bloomsbury, Too
Ron Milewicz at George Billis Gallery; Babar at Mary Ryan Gallery; the Bloomsbury group and some others at Davis and Langdale.
Season Openers
Ken Kewley’s collages at Lori Bookstein; Michael Tompkins’s still lifes come to New York; Biomorphic abstraction from the 1940s at Michael Rosenfeld.
Ahab in Maine
Neil Welliver’s memorial exhibition at Alexandre Gallery
Lessons from the Academy
Selections from the permanent collection at the Dahesh Museum
The Black and the Baudy
Black paintings at Betty Cuningham Gallery; priapism at Mary Ryan Gallery
Summer Pleasures
Cynthia Knott and the American Sublime; Karen Weiner and the American frontier, maybe; Zeuxis and the enduring still life.
No Asset to Ground Zero
Drawing Center culture at the Ground Zero memorial
Myth and its Discontents
Dances of Death at Tatischeff Gallery; mawkish grown-ups at M.Y. Prospects
Landscapes from Home and Middle-Earth
Rick Dula’s industrial landscapes at George Billis Gallery; John Rasely at Allan Stone; David Dewey at Bernaducci-Meisel.
Under the Sheets with Four Impressionists
Review of Jeffrey Meyers’s “Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt;” plus Barbara Grossman at New York Studio School
A Tammany Hall Salon
The National Academy’s 180th annual exhibition; plus Hubertus Gojowczyk’s bewitchments at Achim Moeller Fine Art
Sweet May
Drawings and prints by Emily Nelligan and Marvin Bileck at Alexandre Gallery; Jane Piper at Hollis Taggart; Cornelia Foss at DFN
From Here to Obscurity
Larry Rivers at Marlborough; plus Susannah Phillips at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; Francis Luis Mora (1894-1940) at ACA Galleries; Willem de Kooning at Paul Thiebaud Gallery
An Unmanifesto
A Proposal to Retire “Catholic Art”
A Treasure Hunt
American drawings and watercolors at DC Moore Gallery; plus, a brief homily by Israel Hershberg
Three Realists
Israel Hershberg in group show at Marlborough; Philip Pearlstein’s paintings from the 1960’s at Adam Baumbold; William Bailey at Betty Cuningham
Keeping Faith with Observation
Documentary photography by Ian Teh at Jack Shainman; Paintings by Adele Alsop at Alexandre Gallery
Telling the American Story
Hollis Taggart’s 25th Anniversary Exhibition
Do-It-Yourself Mythmaking
R.B. Kitaj’s Painting at Marlborough Gallery and a Manifesto, Too.
A Chat with A Dealer
Virginia Zabriskie’s 50 Years as a Friend of Art and Artists
Dog-Patch Aesthetics vs. The Real Thing
Petah Coyne at Galerie Lelong; Loren MacIver at Alexandre Gallery; Henri Plaat and Vincent Hamel at Howard Scott
Heavy Machinery and Gnomic Vignettes
Old and new collages by John Walker at Knoedler & Co; Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker covers at PaceWildenstein
Paradise Regained
Collage and boxed assemblages by Hannelore Baron; plus invented architecture by Stephen Talasnik and Maine watercolors by Susan Shatter
Art, the Destroyer
“Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art” by Roger Kimball, Encounter Books
An American in Paris; Another on Long Island
John Dubrow at Lori Bookstein Fine Arts; Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy
Provocations
Jack Levine at DC Moore Gallery; Vincent Smith at Alexandre Gallery; plus Robert Bauer’s drawings at Forum Gallery
Cassatt’s Pioneering Inventiveness
Counterproofs by Mary Cassatt at Adelson Galleries; plus Balthus in a midtown window
Just Looking
Dawn Clements at Pierogi and Feigen Contemporary; Uri Blayer at Tatischeff
Gallery-Going Round-up
Alexi Worth and Jane Wilson at DC Moore Gallery; Charles Cajori at Lohin-Geduld Gallery; Stuart Shils at Tibor de Nagy Gallery; Group show at the Painting Center
Following Her Instincts
Joan Snyder’s Womanart at Alexandre Gallery and Betty Cuningham Gallery
Fragile Realms of Memory
Edward Hopper and John Marin: Works on Paper at Hirschl Adler
Bartleby, Uptown & Pascal, Downtown
Albert York at Davis & Langdale; Giorgio Morandi at Lucas Schoormans Gallery; Nicholas Evans-Cato at George Billis Gallery
Pattern Painting, Still
Robert Kushner at DC Moore; Tine Lundsfryd and Rosemarie Beck at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
From Poetry to Pseudo-Politics
Ben Nicholson at Jacobson Howard; Alex Katz at Pace Wildenstein; Kwang-Young Chun at Kim Foster Gallery; Nancy Chunn at Ronald Feldman Fine Art
Art-Smart Catholicism
Review of “Post Modern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art” by Eleanor Heartney. New York: MidMarch Arts Press, 2004.
Land, Line and Color
Richard Diebenkorn prints in Katonah; Contemporary landscapes at Forum Gallery
Summer, Still
Peter Flaccus at Zabriskie; “Back to Paint” at C&M Arts; photogoraphic stuffs at Julie Saul
Summer Round-up
Willard Boepple at Salander O’Reilly; Cityscapes at George Billis; Joan Brown at George Adams; Plus post-industrial folk art and two-headed prima donnas.
Gallery-Going, June
Stanley Spencer at CDS Gallery; a fest at Lohin-Geduld; nocturnes at Elizabeth Harris
An Odd Night at the Movies
Odd Nerdrum at Forum Gallery; plus Gretna Campbell at Tibor de Nagy and Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries.
An American Original
Guy Péne du Bois at James Graham & Sons
The Discipline of Observation
Rackstraw Downes’ Drawings at The New York Studio School
Overreaching
Christopher Le Brun at Marlborough Chelsea
Two Artists Who Walked Away
Lee Bontecou at Knoedler & Company; Sarah G. Austin at Kimberly Venardos & Company
Gallery Going, May
Anita Huffington’s sculpture at O’Hara Gallery; Reality, Chelsea style at Spike Gallery; Vincent Pomilio at Van Brunt Gallery
Color Me Bored / Color Me Glad
Colored Pencil at KS Arts; Lori Bookstein’s stable
Travel Pictures
Alexander Creswell at Hirshl Adler Galleries; Dee Shapiro at Andre Zarre Gallery
Gallery Going, April
Victor Pesce at Elizabeth Harris Gallery; Irwin Kremen at ACA Galleries; Still Life at DC Moore.
Gallery Going, March
David Levine at Forum; trompe l’oeil at Hollis Taggart; photorealism at Bernaducci-Meisel
Three Approaches to Nature
Wendy Mark at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; The drawings of Rosemarie Beck and Paul Resika; Andrea Morganstern at Kimberly Venardos
The Human Figure: Presence or Decoration?
Vincent Desiderio at the Marlborough; Raymond Han’s Still Lives at Forum Gallery
An Exhibition and A Movie
Rosemarie Beck at the New York Studio School: plus Osama, the movie
The Disappearance of Adulthood
John Currin at the Whitney Museum
Red
Indians and Academics
Caren Canier at Concordia Gallery
Martha
Meyer Erlebacher at Forum Gallery
The dangers of literalism; plus, some last words of Susanna
Coffey
Janet
Malcolm / Susanna Coffey
Smart collages at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; Vacant painting at
Tibor de Nagy
Christopher
Columbus
Patron saint of everyone who misses the
turnoff and winds up in Cleveland
Making
Art and Faking It
Mario Naves at Elizabeth Harris Gallery;
Yoko Ono revives Cut Piece
Summer
Visits
Watercolor at Kouros Gallery; An accidental
archive; A canvasser at home
Recent
Orthodoxies
Review of WOMEN, ART, AND POWER AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Linda Nochlin,
Harper & Row. 176pp.
The
Zen of Painting and Some Other Things
Shigeno Ichimura at M.Y. Art Prospects; Fiber artists for peace
Making Pictures
John DuBrow at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries; Mel Ramos at Bernaducci-Meisel
Gallery
Working
From Life
An Interview with Tim Kennedy
Winter
Curry II
Diana Horowitz at Hirschl Adler Modern; Don Beal at Prince Street
Gallery; Gainsborough anyone?
Winter
Curry
William Hudders at Tatischeff; The National Education Association
at sea
Once Upon
A Time in the West
David Lowe at Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art
Delectamenti,
Uptown & Down
Marianne Gagnier at Maurice Arlos Fine Arts; Langdon Quin at
Kraushaar Gallery
An Atelier
& a Kunsthalle
Watercolor at the New York Studio School; Drawings at Marist
College
High
Gifts and Creative Intuition
Lennart Anderson at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries
Sweet September,
In Town and Out
Leland Bell at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries
August,
Art and the Catholic League
How to cope with cultural dementia
Necrophilia
in the Studio
William Bailey at Robert Miller Gallery
Is
There a Patch Test for Art Intolerance?
Caren Golden Fine Art
Gardenscapes
with Brio
Lois Dodd at Fischbach Gallery
The
Dinner Party is a Church Supper
Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum
In the
Studio Mirror
Steven Harvey at Gallery Schlesinger
The
Legacy of Hans Hofmann
Selections from the Hofmann School
A Pastel
Colorist
Janet Monafo at Hollis Taggart Galleries
Architecture
of Cityscapes
Bernardo Siciliano at Forum Gallery
Finding
the Tone
Romare Bearden's Monotypes; Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop
View
from a Tabernacle
Does style matter in the liturgical arts? [Reprinted from Crisis]
Blue Charm
Cynthia Knott at DC Moore Gallery
The Mystery
of Form
Alan Magee at Hollis Taggart Galleries
Artists
/ Mentors
Faculty and students from the Art Students League, the Studio
School and the National Academy at Denise Bibro Fine Arts
On
Walls vs. On Wall Plaques
Biennial Exhibition 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art
The Contemporaneity
of Tradition
Brett Bigbee at Tibor de Nagy Gallery
Porn in the
U.S.A., Part I
Hard Cop, Soft Cop: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin on
Pornography [Reprinted from The Nation]
Porn in the
U.S.A., Part II
An Exchange of Letters [Reprinted from The Nation]
Our Bodies,
Our Statues
Review of MONUMENTS & MAIDENS: The
Allegory of the Female Form. By Marina Warner. Atheneum. 417
pp. [Reprinted from The Nation]
Viking
Drag
Odd Nerdrum at Forum Gallery
Artistic
Influence & Rhetoric
Jan Müller & Bob Thompson at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
Painting
about Paintings
Anne Tabachnick at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
A Complementary
Pairing
Mark Workman's Pennsylvania landscapes & Billy Sullivan's
flower pastels at Fischbach Gallery
Previous essays
on art and culture have appeared in a range of national
publications, including: The Nation, Hudson Review,
Commonweal, Crisis, Arts Magazine, Newsday, and The
New York Times. |
