Pepe Karmel

Pepe Karmel teaches modern and contemporary art in the Department of Art History, New York University. He has written for the New York Times, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. His most recent book is Looking at Picasso (2023).

October 2025Art

LISA CORINNE DAVIS with Pepe Karmel

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Brooklyn-based artist Lisa Corinne Davis has long been an important presence in the New York scene. Her hybrid compositions are both compelling examples of postmodern abstraction and personal expressions of her experience as a Black woman artist. She has taught at Yale and at Hunter College, inspiring generations of students. Pepe Karmel sat down to talk with Davis at Miles McEnery Gallery, where a show of her new paintings opened on September 4.

Portrait of Lisa Corinne Davis, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.

September 2024Critics Page

Pepe Karmel

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Phyllis Tuchman’s questionnaire has a wonderful historical resonance, echoing Irving Sandler’s classic 1959 questionnaire “Is There a New Academy?” and its 1967 sequel, “Sensibility of the Sixties,” for which Sandler recruited Barbara Rose to help him pose an expanded list of questions. Contemporary art has been transformed multiple times since the sixties. Abstraction, once seen as the cutting edge of the contemporary, is now just one tendency among many. So it is a good moment to revisit these questions.

July/August 2024Critics Page

SPECULUM MUNDI: For an Iconography of the Present

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In his introduction to The Gothic Image (1899, English trans. 1913), Émile Mâle implicitly acknowledges that a nineteenth-century viewer may find the visual language of medieval art obscure. Mâle responds by explaining that, unlike art in the Renaissance tradition, medieval art does not attempt to reproduce literal appearances. Rather, it is “a sacred writing of which every artist must learn the characters.”
Portrait of Pepe Karmel, graphite on paper by Phong H. Bui.

April 2024Art

Pat Steir with Pepe Karmel

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For over three decades, Pat Steir has been one of the leading painters in America. Her abstract waterfalls, with their rivulets of paint descending through cosmic spaces, discover unsuspected possibilities in the vocabulary of gestural abstraction, and reveal a profound spiritual dimension to contemporary art.
Portrait of Pat Steir, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui from a portrait by Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project.

Dec/Jan 2023–24ArtSeen

Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn

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The installations encourage the viewer to travel back in time, imagining the work as it appeared at the moment of its creation.
Installation view: Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2023-24. Courtesy The Met. Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen.

September 2021ArtSeen

Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities

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There are no simple answers in Sikander’s work. But there is an urgent invitation to walk through the looking glass into a series of different worlds, foreign yet uncannily familiar, where the partitions of other continents reveal the fault lines of our own.
Shahzia Sikander, The Scroll (detail), 1989–90. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 13 1/2 x 63 7/8 inches. Collection of the Artist, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

Ad ReinhardtBlack Paintings

Ad Reinhardt: Unvirtual Images

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Like a procession of Japanese monks with black robes and shaven heads, the 13 late paintings by Ad Reinhardt circle a large white room at David Zwirner Gallery.
Installation view, Ad Reinhardt, David Zwirner, New York, 2013. Photo by Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART © 2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.

Dec/Jan 12–13ArtSeen

Three Crises

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It seems to me that there are at least three crises in contemporary art criticism: first, a perceived marginalization; second, a loss of intellectual moorings following on the disappearance of the avant-garde; third, a dawning recognition of the inadequacy of conventional taste.

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