The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
JUN 2008
Art
James Harithas with Raphael Rubinstein
by Raphael RubinsteinArt
It must have been around 1997 that I was having lunch with Jim Harithas and Norman Bluhm on Mercer Street in SoHo and I described to them an exhibition I’d just seen at the Drawing Center.
Mowry Baden's "Leisure Monuments"
by Robert Hullot-KentorArt
No getting cozy; no sense propping up a window, leaning back in a chair or adjusting the lamp. There is a story to tell and snap shots to look at, but this will be over before it starts.
Chuck Close with Phong Bui
by Phong BuiArt
The following conversation between Chuck Close and Rail Publisher Phong Bui was initially held at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation—The Space Program in its new location at 20 Jay Street, D.U.M.B.O., Brooklyn, of whom both are members of the Artists Advisory Committee—then carried further at the painter’s West Village home last Sunday.
David Novros with Phong Bui
by Phong BuiArt
Since his last exhibition of six copper paintings at Earl McGrath Gallery in 2000, David Novros has been working on five monumental paintings which can be seen as his synthesis of early shaped canvas and fresco paintings. On a sunny afternoon this Spring, Rail Publisher Phong Bui paid a visit to the painter’s studio to talk about his life and work.
Wynn Kramarsky with William Corbett
by William CorbettArt
Wynn Kramarsky’s collection of contemporary works on paper consists of more than 3,000 drawings amassed over the last 50 years. His interests focus on the work of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist artists. Kramarsky currently serves on the Board of Trustees of New York’s Museum of Modern Art—where he is active on the Drawings, Education, Library and Museum Archives committees—and on the Board of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He has formerly served as Chairman of the Andy Warhol Foundation and Chairman of The Drawing Center in New York. William Corbett of the CUE Art Foundation Advisory Council welcomed Kramarsky to CUE for an interview before a packed house.
Tribute to Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008)
by Dorothea Rockburne and Nan RosenthalArt
Rauschenberg said “There is no reason not to consider the world as a gigantic painting.” The process of cropping artfully from the “gigantic painting” and then clustering the actuality and materials of the real world in and onto his art was his central project.
Lost In Space: Art Post-Studio
by Sharon ButlerArt
Renaissance artists were members of professional guilds, maintained studios known as workshops, and staffed them with assistants to help complete monumental commissions. But that was an era in which princes and popes extolled artists as the aesthetic lifeblood of the city-state and supported them accordingly. In modern times, artists haven’t been able to count on such public largess.
Brooklyn Dispatches
by James KalmArt
He was a goner, a nonentity, and although he’s had a perfectly respectable career, to the forces that “streamline” history, he was invisible.
The Mind-Body Problem: Courbet, Poussin and Contemporary Art
by Ben La RoccoArt
Two recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art give insight into our heritage from the tradition of European art. The first is Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (February 12 – May 11) and the second is Courbet (February 27 – May 18). Incredibly, Arcadian Visions is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Poussin’s landscape painting. Courbet is the artist’s first full retrospective in 30 years.
At Rest, in Peace: Farewell to Patrick Ireland
by Whitney RuggArt
A procession began with the museum’s accompanying exhibition, The Burial of Patrick Ireland. At the interment site, a modest pine coffin holding a death mask of the artist was lowered by pall bearers into the ground. The somber services included orations and poetry readings by prominent art world figures, culminating in a haunting recitation of keening, the traditional Irish mourning wail, by artist Alanna O’Kelly. At the completion of the ceremony, the audience of onlookers—comprised of the artist’s family, friends, colleagues, scholars, reporters, and members of the general public—burst into raucous applause as Brian O’Doherty, the man who created Patrick Ireland, stood with his arms outstretched, cheering “thank you for peace!”
