Alan Sonfist: American Earth Landscape

By Norman L Kleeblatt

NOV 2021 | ArtSeen

When you google “land art” one of the top options features two photographic examples: Robert Smithson’s monumental Spiral Jetty (1970), perhaps the paradigm for the genre, and Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1978). Smithson’s earthwork is a massive and muscular transformation of terrain set in the vast open area of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Its image is quickly identifiable, iconic. Time Landscape is modest, non-iconic, and set in the heart of an urban metropolis.

Judith Baumel with Catherine Parnell

SEPT 2022 | Books

The last time Judith Baumel and I engaged in conversation via the Brooklyn Rail was February 2020, during the before times. When Covid took over, life seemed to be in the breakdown lane, but that didn’t stop Baumel. She geared up an eclectic group of scholars and writers and artists for weekly Zoom conversations focused on the classics and, line by line, they made their way through Dante's Divine Comedy and are now halfway through Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Robert Motherwell Illustrating Poetry

By Heidi Colsman-Freyberger

FEB 2023 | Critics Page

In his eulogy for Robert Motherwell the English critic Bryan Robertson remarked, “No other artist in this century could have been quite so much in love with literature, and, above all, poetry.”

Lytle Shaw’s New Grounds for Dutch Landscape

MAY 2022 | Art

Lytle Shaw’s engrossing New Grounds for Dutch Landscape is a poetic revision of no less than two centuries of in-gazing art history. On the occasion of the book’s publication, the Rail has commissioned exchanges with some of Shaw’s interested readers.