David Carrier
David Carrier is a philosopher and art critic who has published books on topics such as the methodologies of art history, Poussin’s paintings, Baudelaire’s art criticism, and the aesthetics of comics. He has held academic positions at Carnegie Mellon University, Case Western Reserve University, and the Cleveland Institute of Art. His recent works include Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art: Maria Bussmann’s Drawings (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Bill Beckley and Narrative Art: The Word-Image Riddle and the Aesthetics of Beauty (Electa, 2023).
At the time of the Great Depression, and then during the Second World War and the Cold War, Ben Shahn (1898–1969) provided reliable critical political commentary on American life. He championed the struggling poor, farmers, labor union members, and oppressed racial minorities.
The label at the entrance to a museum group show should reveal the concept unifying the works on display. Here the label “Proust y las artes” (“Proust and the Arts”) implies that there is some relationship between the more than one hundred old master paintings and modernist works, along with some of Proust’s manuscripts and his novel. But what exactly is the connection between these very varied artworks and that book?
Corpi Moderni: The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice looks to a wide range of artifacts from the period to understand the importance of the changing “codes of the body.”
Over the years, I got to know Graham Nickson—the splendidly original English figurative artist who ran the New York Studio School and who recently passed away—visiting his studio and writing a catalogue essay for him.
In our culture there are two often very distinct forms of art writing. There is art criticism, which is journalistic writing, as found in newspapers such as Artforum and the Rail. And there is academic writing, such as you find in the Art Bulletin and books about art.
Period labels are useful for classification, and so essential for orienting ourselves when facing art. To identify an artwork as “baroque” or “modernist” is a useful, if very tentative way of identifying its place in history.
The aim of this massive exhibition, which contains more than one-hundred paintings, sculptures, metalworks, and fabrics, is to demonstrate the seminal importance of Sienese art. Siena: The Rise of Painting focuses on the portable paintings.
In 1989 I was enchanted by David Rabinowitch’s Tyndale Constructions in Five Planes with West Fenestration: Sculpture for Max Imdahl (1988), five large sets of concentric circles carved into the walls at Barbara Flynn’s gallery in SoHo. And so I met him, and eventually after much discussion, we published an interview together.
In the early 1970s, Leonard Hilton McGurr became famous. Taking the name FUTURA 2000, he did art in the subways. The handout for his current Bronx Museum exhibition includes a photo, from 1981, of him with his peers, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. At that time, their graffiti was seen as a political failure, revealing that the city could not control its public spaces.
Kathia St. Hilaire, born in 1995 into a family who emigrated from Haiti, grew up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida. Then she studied art at Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design. This show of nearly twenty works, most of them large, presents Haitian subjects.
In the 1980s, when I started publishing criticism, Julian Schnabel’s art was much denounced. When I walked through the Vito Schnabel Gallery, I was dumbfounded, astonished, and pleased, all at once. I immediately saw that it was time to revise my prior judgment.
Because the artist is generally much less well known (at least in this country) than his French peers, the Neue Galerie provides much usable information about their context, including an elaborate timeline, numerous photographs and works on paper. By the time you arrive at the final gallery, you are well primed to look at his four medium-sized landscape paintings.
Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) was a survivor. An Austrian Romani, she was nine years old when she and her entire family were imprisoned during the Holocaust, which only some of them survived. She was held in the camps at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen, but only much later, in 1988, did she begin making art about her experiences (in addition to painting, Stojka was also a writer and singer). Recently, her work has been shown in Austria, France and Spain, but this exhibition, organized by Marianne Le Métayer, Nathalie Vallois, and Georges-Philippe Vallois, is the first American presentation of her paintings.
In Look Again: European Paintings 1300–1800 you really have entered a new art world. Instead of thinking of Europe as a self-contained continent, you see it as a porous site, historically open to cultural exchanges with other artistic cultures.
When in 1505 a fire damaged a very important commercial site, it was quickly rebuilt. And then in 1508 Titian competed with Giorgione in doing frescoes on this building. The exhibition’s Italian title marks this moment as the beginning of Titian’s brilliant career.
When an artistic tradition moves from one culture to another, it inevitably changes. And if that other culture is very different, it changes greatly. When El Greco moved from being an icon painter in Greece to Italy, and then on to Spain, inevitably his pictures changed.
Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Parisian contemporaries, were sometimes friends. And of course, as Impressionists both men portrayed the subjects Charles Baudelaire laid out in his influential 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: café scenes and popular entertainments; wars and domestic political events; and depictions of contemporary dress. With more than 160 paintings and works on paper on display, and a fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly essays, Manet/Degas is a classical blockbuster, a massive crowd-pleasing display of two painters who have often been presented at the Met.
As its title, Trembling Earth signals, the exhibition is focused on his images of nature. That title is taken from the drawing The Human Being and its Three Power Centers (1930), displayed in the exhibition. For Munch, humanity is interconnected with the universe in an energy flow that he called “earth waves,” or “trembling earth.”
By now, Frank Stella’s illustrious, long career is very well documented. We know by heart the story of his early development of proto-minimalism; his transition to making elaborate decorative paintings; and his construction of metallic relief sculptures. And of course we have his fine, highly personal book, Working Space (1986), which relates that development to the prior history of early modernism. The story of Stella’s art is, arguably, the story of late twentieth-century American painting. What more can he possibly do at this point? And how might his style in old age add to our picture of this artistic period?
Here, then, we get a good presentation of Scully’s entire development. I cannot imagine a better introduction to his art.
But while for at least two generations, recent German art has been much displayed in our galleries and museums, many of the 31 artists or working groups of artists in Body and Territory are not familiar. This show aspires to change that situation.
Cubism and the Trompe l'Oeil Tradition reveals important, far reaching parallels between trompe l’oeil paintings and Cubist collages. The subjects of these two kinds of pictures include a great variety of handicrafts, all of them small enough to be hand-held: sheets of wallpaper, notated music, chair caning, newspapers, mirrors, musical instruments, bits of picture frames, letters, small pictures within pictures, calling cards, drawing instruments, counterfeited money, advertising materials, and real or fake postage stamps.
In his survey Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture, Anthony Blunt says that he counted more than two hundred churches, and a great deal of painting, sculpture, and decorative art was—and mostly still is—housed in these churches. But Naples’ artistic history has been marginalized.
In the preface of Mirror of the World. A New History of Art, Julian Bell says that he sees “art history as a frame within which world history, in all its breadth, is continually reflected back at us.” His description applies word for word to this International, which does a superlative job of reflecting our present political situation.
Jamie Earnest’s seven medium-sized paintings each frame a window, an opening outward or a ladder leading upwards, linking her imagined space to an outside world.
Turato’s art is difficult to classify. In advertisements the words often supplement an image. You see a glamorous model and learn who designed their clothes. Or you view a car and read the manufacturer’s name. But what is Turato advertising?
Raised in Lancaster farming territory, in a Pennsylvania community near Philadelphia, Warren Rohrer (1927–95) was descended from many generations of Mennonite farmers. For a long time, he lived on a farm amongst the Mennonites. And so, becoming an artist involved some real personal struggle. And although he left that community, this tradition gave him close, lasting ties to nature and agriculture. This show of abstract paintings and drawings from the 1990s reflects this, his lived experience.
Born in Brooklyn to a relatively poor family, Harold Rosenberg spent a couple of years at City College and briefly attended law school. In the 1930s he wrote poetry and worked as an editor. Then during World War Two, because he had an injured leg, and wasn’t drafted, Rosenberg lived in Washington, DC and worked for the Office of War Information.
Bouabré said that he didn’t work from his imagination, but drew what delighted him. His delights included cloud formations; the natural markings on the surfaces of oranges, bananas, kola nuts, and leaves; numbering systems; and, more broadly, what he called “knowledge of the world.”
March 2022ArtSeen
Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library
Because the Hispanic Society is in Washington Heights, Manhattan, it has until recently had a marginal position in the New York art world. Although it’s only about 75 blocks uptown from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that can seem a long journey to the busy critic. I, at least, confess that in all my years of reviewing, I’d never visited this institution. And so, right now, while the museum is closed for renovations, I came because a selection of the best works is on display. How amazing that it took me all of these years to get uptown to see the best portrait in a New York City museum, Francisco de Goya’s The Duchess of Alba (1797).
When you go up the stairs through the main entrance into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, if you turn to the right you immediately enter the Egyptian galleries. And if you head to the left and walk through the Greek galleries, you get to the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, where the Sub-Saharan Adrian art is displayed. But since Egypt is in Africa, it’s natural to wonder why the displays of African art are divided this way. The answer involves the history of the museum.
Jane Freilicher (1924–2014) and Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019), both important painters, were very different artists. She made figurative paintings of still life objects with countryside and urban scenes in the background, while he was an abstract painter whose subjects had elusive, “real” sources. They hardly knew each other, and they certainly didn’t influence each other. What, then, is to be gained displaying them together, in this exhibition of some 16 works, late paintings by both of them?
Shikō Munakata (1903–75), a Tokyo-based printmaker, became internationally famous in the 1950s. Starting in 1959, he often visited New York, which he thought of as his second home. Much inspired by Vincent van Gogh, (who himself was of course much influenced by prints from Japan), Munakata modernized the style of classic Japanese prints to present subjects from contemporary life. This exhibition includes nearly 100 of his woodblock prints, most in black-and-white, some in color.
As has often been noted, the ability to make photographs as large as easel paintings allows them to compete visually with paintings. But of course that practical consideration merely identifies the necessary condition for the success of this novel artistic genre; it doesn’t tell us how to interpret these works.
Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) had an astonishing capacity to develop. Looking just at the works in Wild Life, her two person show with the sculptor Jessi Reaves (b. 1986) curated by Rebecca Matalon, the distance between Night Empire (1967-68) and C Painting (1980-81) is amazing.
What can pictures tell us about the great events of political history? Recent scholarship identified the complex relationship between Jacques-Louis David’s history paintings and the French Revolution. Was he truly a prophet?
Border Crossings and its accompanying, richly illustrated catalogue highlight important issues for the reception of art across the ideological boundary between North and South Korea.
Liliane Tomasko’s new paintings, all made in 2019 and 2020, are about liminal states. In the gallery announcement she says: “maybe during those hours spent in this almost unconscious state, something is illuminated that cannot be seen in the brightness of the day.” Her art aims to recover and represent these experiences.
Just before the end of his life, Okwui Enwezor worked with Massimiliano Gioni to organize this exhibition, which now is installed on all three floors of the New Museum. It is presented with curatorial support from Naomi Beckwith, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash.
The new edition includes just 20 pages of editorial material and a six-paragraph highly elusive introduction by Warburg himself. But most of the book is devoted to a reconstruction of his picture atlas: collected arrays of old master paintings, contemporary works, prints and also newspaper clippings and other materials from popular culture placed on large screens.
Presented in nine galleries on the second floor of the new wing of the Kunstmuseum Basel, this large display encompasses 120 works, including paintings and works on paper by Rembrandt. It is a visually effective presentation of Holland’s 17th-century colonialist cultural encounters. The “Orient” in this exhibition encompasses the territories on the Dutch trade routes, the Mediterranean sites controlled by the Ottoman Empire, as well as Persia, India, and the Far East.
The exhibitions We Do Not Dream Alone, the inaugural Asia Society Triennial, and Dreaming Together at the New-York Historical Society bring together works by over 40 artists selected from the collections of both institutions in a thoughtful and very welcome showcasing of the work of Asian and Asian-diasporic artists still underrepresented in mainstream Euro-American contexts. At this moment, when the movement of people and even artworks is difficult, the mere existence of this two-museum show is a major accomplishment.
10 artists present the theme “Make Our Differences Our Strengths” using 14 billboards, with six more locations to go up on December 28. Seeing the exhibition requires a long afternoon of driving on suburban roads, with the aid of GPS.
The show’s title comes from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a populist fascist becomes America’s president. But the tone is entirely Sue Coe’s own. Throughout the show, she presents industrial pollution, racist politicians, sexist violence, and the slaughter of animals for food.
This exhibition, which includes nearly 90 works, is an ambitious revisionist exercise. Known by the infelicitous nickname “Luca fa presto,” Giordano did paint quickly, creating more than 5,000 frescoes and paintings. To be so productive he had, as you might expect, an army of assistants.
These are Color Field works, made quickly after painstaking preparation of the grounds, using spray paints. Describing them as Claudian Color Field paintings, Aden says that they allude to “those rare moments as the sun ignites a new day or gently fades into the evening.
As the catalogue exhibition essay by Francesco Solinas says, she was a famously “strong and combative” woman whose “unbridled ambition for success, wealth and higher social standing” made her famous and successful during her lifetime. But reaching that goal took heroic struggle and for a long time, Baroque painting and art by women was marginalized.
Just as René Magritte’s Surrealist paintings often rely upon unexpected juxtapositions of banal objects or scenes, a daylight sky and a nighttime street for example, so Banksy shocks by creating irrational correspondences.
Almost inevitably, we initially describe and understand what is marvelous but unfamiliar in terms of what we know. And so the quilts of Tompkins have been compared with the paintings of Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian; and her improvisations related to those of jazz musicians.
This “incredibly anxious time,” Johnson says, “feels simultaneously unsettling, urgent, and radical.” And so he aims to respond in this art. Red is the color of anxiety.
Richard Brettell studied art history at Yale University, becoming an authority on Impressionism. After a distinguished teaching career, he was appointed Searle Curator of European Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Peter Saul (b. 1934) is a classic Pop artist who, with his current exhibition at the New Museum, is achieving the recognition he has long deserved.
This pioneering exhibition of 200 works includes sculptures, fabrics, and some manuscripts, supplemented with detailed maps, useful captions, a massive catalogue, and a video.
Museums have to contend with increasing numbers of visitors, but how these expansions of the buildings and the collections are supported financially considerably varies from one country to another. Pierre Rosenberg speaks with the Rail about his tenure as director of the Louvre, from 1994 to 2001.
Acquired on eBay consists of dense hangings of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and also some books, mostly small, by relatively marginal recent artists. On the second floor of a building on the Lower East Side, the Algus Gallery is about as far from gentrification as you can get in the Manhattan art world.
In his radical political treatise, The Subjection of Women (1869), John Stuart Mill briefly takes up discussion of female visual artists. If, as he claims, women are as fully able as men, then why, he asks, have there been no highly distinguished women painters?
Eight of Ron Gorchov’s classic paintings on shields, executed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are currently on view in the new uptown gallery of Cheim & Read. Two of them arch out vertically, while the others are horizontally oriented. None, needless to say, are either rectangular or flat.
I first met Carol Szymanski and reviewed one of her shows in 1992. At the time she was constructing musical instruments that were a cross between sculpture and readymades. When then I reviewed her exhibitions in 2002 and, again, in 2012, her art had gone through some dramatic changes. Her day in banking had become more demanding; now based in London, she used that situation to create a fascinating, almost daily bulletin, she calls the cockshut dummy.
By David Carrier, Craig Olson, David Levi Strauss, Jennifer R. Gross, Chris Martin, Jason Rosenfeld, David Goerk, and Sid Sachs
Tom was one of the first postwar artists to question the heritage, hubris, and clichéd bloat of Abstract Expressionism. His intelligence transformed art as a political act; the creation of exquisite canvases that would fit in humble homes and not necessarily be destined for corporations or institutions
In his luminous essay “The School of Giorgione” (1877) Walter Pater, asserting that painting “must be before all things decorative, a thing for the eye, a space of colour on the wall,” describes the art of Giorgione, as he imagines it.
During the 1920s and ’30s Arshile Gorky and his New York fellow painters slowly and with real difficulty worked their way through European modernism.
When staying at a luxurious Normandy beach hotel, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and a pal write a friendly note to a famous painter, Elstir, who lives nearby. Elstir then invites Marcel for a studio visit, though Marcel would prefer to meet the girls he sees but doesn’t yet know.
What can an abstract painting represent? Rochelle Feinstein offers a plenitude of answers. Image of an Image is the most challenging retrospective that I have recently had the pleasure of viewing.
Where is the dividing line between painting and photography, two visual artistic media that are often said to be essentially opposed? The long history of very diverse answers to this question is fascinating and revealing.John Houck’s liminal art, which marks and erases the boundaries between painting and photography, offers a highly original extension of this lengthy history.
This, the first museum retrospective devoted to the New York painter Harvey Quaytman (1937 – 2002), includes more than seventy works, many of them large.
No curatorial task is more difficult than assembling an international survey exhibition. If in Pittsburgh, the task is further complicated by the history of the Carnegie Museum and its Internationals.
On successive mornings in July, in sunny Dublin, I had the privilege of interviewing two museum directors. We talked about practical and conceptual issues—and we discussed the history of their institutions
Intimate Infinite is a revelatory commentary on the history of gallery spaces. In the three floors of the Lévy Gorvy gallery on Madison Avenue you see almost one hundred works, most of them small enough to fit into your carry-on luggage, by twenty-seven artists.
Our prime interest in this interview has been to inquire on the origins of the JPNF and how this museum came to be established in this location. As most of our readers will have not (yet) visited Dubai—indeed, thus far only one of us has made the journey—we wanted to get some essential background information about Dubai’s art scene.
Everyone knows about rapid climate change. No one who even glances at the newspaper or looks at the news can be unaware of these concerns. How, then, can visual artists respond to this situation? Mark Cheetham argues that politically responsible contemporary art needs to explicitly take account of ecological issues.
In his late, short book St. Mark’s Rest (1877), John Ruskin says that nations compose their autobiographies in three ways: in “the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.”
In 1973 Martin Cooper made the first public cell phone call from the street in mid-town Manhattan. New Era, a continuous ten minute, fifty-six second loop video by Doug Aitken responds to that event and the present consequences of this new technology.
Early on Giorgio Morandi was a familiar, but marginal figure within Italian Futurism, who by the time of his death occupied only a modest place in modernist collecting culture. Thanks to important historical work by Janet Abramowicz in Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence (2005), we have a reliable account of Morandi’s life. To this growing corpus, we can now add the perspectives of other contemporary artists collected in Zwirner Books’s Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings.
Sylvain Bellenger, who was born in Normandy, took French degrees in philosophy and in art history. He then moved to the United States, where he held curatorial posts at the Cleveland Museum of Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago before being appointed in 2014 Director at Capodimonte in Naples.
“The beginning of the “Wall of Light” paintings came when I was sitting on a beach in Mexico in Zihuatanejo. I’d been visiting the ruins and I was in a moment of repose, so I made a little watercolor that was a memory portrait of my impression of what I’d been doing.”
There is a lot to see in each individual work, and there are many large works in this crowded exhibition. You need to take your time here. But ultimately the display works very nicely for German because she is an artist who deals in the stimulating pleasures of visual overload.
For more than three decades now, a great deal of contemporary German painting has been shown in New York. The leading artists have had gallery and museum exhibitions, and all of them have been much celebrated. And yet, as this exhibition shows, how exotic Georg Baselitz’s visual aesthetic remains.
The most remarkable artwork in Richard Serra’s recent exhibition, which included dense paint stick drawings and sculpture, is Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017).
What defines modernist painting, and distinguishes it from old master European art, is the elimination of obvious details. This suppression permits expressive directness and pursuit of immediacy, which makes the figurative works of Matisse and Picasso, like the abstractions of Mondrian and Pollock, distinctively modernist.
When Joachim Pissarro and I began to organize our interviews with major museum directors—men or women who had decisively changed their institutions—from the very start we planned to talk with directors both in this country and internationally. Thus we interviewed not only Jeffrey Deitch, who had directed MOCA in LA; Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan; Alanna Heiss, and then Glenn Lowry, from MoMA; Massimiliano Gioni of the New Museum; and Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem; but also Sir Norman Rosenthal from the Royal Academy, London; and Mikhail Piotrovsky at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. In this, the eighth of our interviews, we talk with Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor who, after a distinguished early career as curator in the United States, organized exhibitions in Europe, where now he is director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Joffe doesn’t repeat herself—she doesn’t need to because she is consistently, magnificently inventive.
In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel says that in art, the unfolding of truth and the revelations of world history are interlinked.
Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, is a native New Yorker who grew up in Queens a precocious art lover. After graduating from Smith College with a BA in Art History and African-American Studies, in 1987 she became a curator at the Studio Museum.
Mangold works in series, reworking a visual motif in varied colors and, sometimes, in paintings of various sizes until he has exhausted its potential.
When painters migrate between previously distant visual cultures, novel artistic syntheses may seem possible. No country has a longer or more illustrious tradition of visual accomplishment than China. But until the 20th century, art in China mostly developed without directly responding to European painting. Zao Wou-Ki was one of the first Chinese painters to attempt a synthesis of these very different traditions.
The photographs in Sally Mann’s exhibition Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington are radically different. For a dozen years, towards the end of his life, Twombly worked half the year in Lexington, Virginia, the small town where, like Mann, he was born.
Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei are closely tied to mass media. Both are celebrities who are famous beyond the narrow bounds of the art world, and both have enormous studios with small armies of assistants. They never really met, but Warhol visited Beijing and Ai lived in Manhattan from 1983 – 93, and so saw Warhol in passing. And so we learn from Eric Shiner’s interview published in the exhibition catalogue, when Ai came to New York, he read The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). “To me,” he said, “Warhol always remained the most interesting figure in American art.
Half a lifetime ago, around 1980, I started doing art criticism under the spell of Joseph Masheck, who was then the editor of Artforum.
Nasreen Mohamedi (1937 – 1990), born in what is now Pakistan, trained partly in London (1954 – 57) and Paris (1961 – 63), was a Muslim who traveled to Bahrain, Iran, and Turkey while she lived and worked in India.
“Where the literature of foreign nations and of past cultures is accessible only across the barrier of language,” Meyer Schapiro wrote, “the works of painting, sculpture, and architecture may be enjoyed directly through the eyes and the humanity of their makers experienced in the expressiveness of forms.”
This selection of paintings Francis Bacon made in the last fifteen years of his life (1977 – 1992) shows how, by employing a seemingly narrow range of subjects, he created an impressive variety of pictures.
Normally, there’s a visually obvious distinction between figurative and abstract paintings. John Constable shows English landscapes, while Jackson Pollock’s large late-1940s abstractions depict nothing real.
By David Carrier, Joachim Pissarro, and Gaby Collins-Fernandez
Alanna Heiss is hailed as a founder of what we know as the “alternative space movement,” and one of the most important centers for contemporary art in the country.
Both parts of this exhibition of fifteen small paintings by Eilshemius and twenty-two by Thompson are very interesting. And both challenge our received ideas of modernism. But what’s puzzling is the conjunction of these two figures.
Driving along narrow country roads eighteen kilometers north of Aix-en-Provence one comes to Château la Coste, an art center designed by Tadao Ando in 2011.
The pleasures and perils of studio visits at provincial art schools are not unfamiliar to us critics. When you see what talented students have learned by imitating faculty artists from a previous generation, you recognize that these young people must move to an art center and radically innovate if they are to find an entry point into the contemporary art world.
When an old master painter shows someone reading, it’s natural to wonder: what is that document? So, for example, when we view the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Johannes Vermeer, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” (1663 − 1664) we may speculate: is this a love letter, a note about practical business, or perhaps something even less exciting?
“Fascinated with buildings—with their spaces, the light that plays around them, their human uses…” the paintings of this artist, which are “works of great poetic beauty, carry an apparent objectivity.” I quote from Gary Schwartz’s account of the Dutch 17th-century painter Pieter Saenredam, which applies also word for word to Richard Estes’s pictures.
When we began this ongoing sequence of interviews with museum directors, we knew that we wanted to talk with Glenn Lowry. To be a director of any museum is a complex, highly conflicted job. To be director of MoMA involves special pressures, which seem unique to the flagship American museum dedicated to collecting and reflecting on modern and contemporary art.
For any art historian interested in Nicolas Poussin but not a devotee of the interpretative literature, visiting this exhibition, which marks the 305th year since the artist’s death in 1665, might be puzzling.
Seeing an artist’s studio is exciting: what admirer of Caravaggio wouldn’t enjoy a glimpse of his workspace, as it is imaginatively reconstructed in Derek Jarman’s 1986 film? By going behind the scenes, we learn about the private life of a creative person, in a way that deepens our knowledge of their art.
This exhibition of Paul Cézanne’s images of his most frequently portrayed model, his wife, Hortense Fiquet (1850 – 1922), includes 24 of the 29 known paintings of her, three watercolors, fourteen drawings, and three sketchbooks.
What often gives the art of an old master emotional depth is the attachment of surprising symbolic meanings to seemingly banal artifacts.
A decade ago, the art historian James Elkins published On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, a book that offered a highly suggestive observation. The United States is a very religious country, he noted, but very little contemporary art found in the mainstream galleries or museums presents religion in a positive way.