Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Twenty-Nine-Year-Old Man (1567), oil on canvas, 22-3/8″ x 17-1/2″; courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art * * * Blink during your next visit to the Met and you’re likely to miss Bellini, Titian, And Lotto; North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, an exhibition snuggled almost imperceptibly into the [...]
Celia Gerard, The Diver (2012), mixed media on watercolor paper, 40″ x 60:; courtesy Tayloe Piggott Gallery * * * The pleasure of Celia Gerard’s art, and its challenge, lies in the equilibrium achieved between improvisation and certitude, between a malleable process and imagery that is finite and clear. With their clusters of diagrammatic geometry, [...]
Anne Arnold, Ohno (Skunk) (1974-75), acrylic on polyester coated Dynel over wooden armature, 25″ high; courtesy Alexandre Gallery * * * The sculptures of Anne Arnold, on display at Alexandre Gallery, are so masterful—so pointed and witty, economically configured and nuanced—that you can’t help but wonder: Why has it been twenty-four years since this artist [...]
Edouard Vuillard, Self-Portrait with Waroquy (1889), oil on canvas, 36-1/2″ x 28-1/2″; courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art * * * Long gone, I hope, are the days when the French painter Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was pooh-poohed as being insufficiently radical or, if you prefer, overly bourgeois—as if art steeped in domesticity and comfort somehow [...]
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1976); courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum * * * For 30-some years, Cindy Sherman has played dress-up in front of the camera in pursuit of “mortification of the self” and “the exploration of identity.” The photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), who died by her own hand at the age [...]
Installation of Dawn Kasper’s This Could Be Something If I Let It (2012); photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images * * * “The first thing you need to know about the Whitney Biennial is that it doesn’t mean anything. Sure, it provides a window, albeit a highly selective one, into that confusing subset of culture known [...]
Odd Nerdrum, Egg Snatchers, oil on canvas, 67-1/3″ x 79-3/4″; courtesy Forum Gallery * * * A nagging question surrounding the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, on display at Forum Gallery, is: Can you still paint like that? “Like that,” as if the past 400 years of Western art hadn’t transpired; to put brush to canvas, [...]
Tom Goldenberg, Italian Rhapsody (2012), oil and charcoal on linen, 78″ x 96″; courtesy the artist * * * “A painting, not a picture”—that distinction was made by a visitor to Tom Goldenberg’s studio after having viewed the artist’s recent canvases. It’s a distinction worth mulling, particularly in an age inundated by virtual images–images with [...]
Kehinde Wiley, Mizrah (2011), oil on canvas, 36″ x 48″; courtesy The Jewish Museum * * * A version of this article originally appeared in the July 28, 2008 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum (until July 29, 2012). In the catalog [...]
Philip Guston, Untitled (A real joy talking . . .) (November 5, 1974), black ink on paper, 8-1/2″ x 11″; courtesy Lori Bookstein Fine Art * * * The following review was originally published in the May 6, 2008 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Art and Letters: Varujan Boghosian [...]
