Adele Tutter
ADELE TUTTER, M.D., Ph.D. is a practicing psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. She is the author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House (forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press) and coeditor of Grief and its Transcendence: Creativity, Memory, and Identity (Routledge). She is currently working on a second monograph, Mourning and Metamorphosis: Poussin's Ovidian Vision.
200 years after the end of her painting career, it’s high time Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 – 1842), better known as Vigée Le Brun, had a major retrospective. An opportunity to see a sizeable amount of her work unlikely to be repeated anytime soon, it also helped save her from the almost certain obscurity that few female artists of her time escaped.
In ancient civilizations, miniature structures of everyday life or the imagined afterlife were often placed alongside the deceased in tombs and burial sites. We are familiar with the funeral boats of ancient Egypt and the terracotta soldiers of ancient China; far less well known are the architectural models found in ancient Mesoamerican and Andean tombs.
One hundred years ago saw the beginning of World War I and the end of the elaborately codified tradition of “wearing mourning.” As the phrase indicates, the word “mourning” had by that time become synonymous with the apparel worn, mainly by women, during the formal mourning period, transforming the internal process of grieving the dead into a codified expression and performance of this process.
The sculptures from which this extraordinary exhibition of selected new and older works by Giuseppe Penone takes its name—Indistinti confini, (Indistinct Boundaries)—look like ordinary tree trunks mounted on finished marble bases and covered with a thick coat of flat white paint, save for certain areas where the bark is peeled away, or where branches are cross-sectioned at their origin.
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.
Maria Morganti is one of those rare artists fortunate enough to have developed a seemingly inexhaustible idiom that is wholly her own—more meaningful than a gimmick, yet simple enough to sustain infinite variation.
…And yes, we see Thérèse’s underpants. The showstopper, “Thérèse Dreaming” (1938), gets deserved pride of place in this exhibition of paintings made by Balthus between 1937 and 1959.
After Joseph Beuys died in January 1986, my then-partner and now-husband, John Hudak, and I organized a mail art show in Philadelphia to honor his passing. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.
