Phyllis Tuchman
Phyllis Tuchman is a critic and art historian. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.
About twenty years ago, for a panel at the College Art Association, I gave a talk about the interviews I conducted for Artforum, Art in America, and Art News during the early 1970s. Back then, few were focused on diversity. If I failed to recognize that Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Larry Poons, Jack Tworkov, John Chamberlain, Herbert Ferber, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, John McCracken, and Michael Heizer were all white guys, I also failed to notice they were all abstractionists. In fact, until the other day, that didn’t seem obvious to me.
How are artists, curators, and historians thinking about the condition of abstraction in contemporary art? The question has an evergreen quality, and the answer can never be singular. In the winter of 1968 Irving Sandler and Barbara Rose sent a questionnaire to their peers, asking them to comment on the “sensibility of the times.” They were especially curious to learn what was considered to be avant-garde, and how the definition might have shifted. Inspired by their collaborative effort and community spirit, Phyllis Tuchman organized the September Critics Page with the assistance of Charles Schultz as a way of marking the moment again.
With paintings, sculpture, works on paper, ceramics, tapestries, and cut-outs by the Fauve artist as well as his friends and colleagues, this exhibition brilliantly illuminated the role that bodies of water played during Matisse’s half-century-plus career.
Peter Sacks’s latest paintings are forthright, absorbing, memorable. This is partly due to their being incredibly tactile. Even more, they are heroic. We were greeted by this combination of qualities at Sacks’s last show. Then too, the work occupied the Norman Foster-designed spaces at Sperone Westwater astonishingly well. Each of the three galleries contained art concerned with different themes; the types of objects embedded in the wood squares varied from one to another; and the shaped canvases (is this a misnomer because the supports are birch blocks, not canvas?) were not alike either.
After giving a talk at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2016, Sze was invited to hold a show there. COVID intervened. Now, the enchanting spaces the Yale-educated artist has filled at this jewel-box-like Dallas institution have opened. It’s a body of work that’s exhilarating, thought-provoking, and visually enticing.
In various ways, In Dialogue with Picasso, co-curated by Joachim Pissarro and the Skarstedt gallery, illuminates how an international roster of artists “have been intensely engaged in thinking about and responding to [Pablo] Picasso.” That’s what this show at Skarstedt Gallery admirably sets out to do.
Bonnard’s Worlds, a retrospective currently on view at the Kimbell Art Museum and traveling to the Phillips Collection in 2024, is aptly named. Spanning almost five decades and comprised of 70 paintings, the show opens with bustling Parisian street scenes and panoramic Riviera landscapes. Instead of progressing chronologically, Nabi canvases are hung beside works from later in the artist’s career, and it’s all of one piece, as it turns out. In this brilliant installation, we discover, gallery by gallery, all sorts of nooks and crannies gleaned from the everyday life of artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947).
Once in a blue moon, an exhibition as enthralling as Manet/Degas comes along. You wonder why it’s never been done before. Currently, more than 160 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints by these two Parisians are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At this point, is there anything new to say about Vincent van Gogh’s art, much less his most famous painting, Starry Night (1889)? After all, a constant stream of noteworthy exhibitions are held every year promising the latest insights and revelations about the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter’s work. In this crowded field, however, Van Gogh’s Cypresses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art stood apart.
Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, an atypical mid-career survey, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through December 3, 2023, comprises 21 paintings, 18 works on paper, 5 sketchbooks, and 3 monotypes made between 1997 and 2022 that treat just two themes: death and a maiden.
Possessing a well-honed, singular formal intelligence, Cragg breathes life into vibrant entities. He masterfully sets in motion rhythmic passages. Repetitive waves wash across his sculptures and enliven his compelling surfaces. His art is fluid, not unchangeable.
Modigliani Up Close, the impressive retrospective on display at the Barnes Foundation—its only venue—this autumn and winter rekindled my deep-rooted feelings for the artist. The scholarly, well-written exhibition catalogue, accessible to laymen, added further to my appreciation.
Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971 is jam packed with treasures and revelations. At the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, you’ll find film clips, movie posters, historical photographs, scripts, film scores, cameras, costumes, artworks by boldface names, and even miscellaneous objects, such as tap shoes worn by the remarkable Nicholas Brothers, as well as one of Louis Armstrong’s trumpets. They’ve all been brought together to tell an unfamiliar story. This astonishing, well-paced journey through seven-plus decades of movie history suggests that this fledgling institution, only a year old, has already emerged as a significant place for film aficionados to discover the past, present, and future of moving pictures.
Oscar Murillo’s latest paintings are big, bold, and breathtaking. They would not look out-of-place in a survey exhibition featuring significant works by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Leslie, Harry Jackson, and Grace Hartigan. Anyone who ever considered this 36-year-old artist a zombie abstractionist should take note. He has matured into someone who should be considered an honorary second-generation Abstract Expressionist.
It’s an illuminating show. Instead of confronting lots of sculptures lite, as some would have it, this retrospective illuminates the changing role objects have played in Koons’s career. Digging deeper, you’ll notice, too, that the terms statues and sculpture are not interchangeable. Though paintings and prints are on display here, the large, three-dimensional works primarily draw our attention.
Say the name Donald Judd, and many people will picture an object that has taut lines, sleek metallic surfaces, and often is two-toned like a sedan from the 1950s. Squiggles don’t come to mind. That’s partly why it was such a surprise to find 15 paintings by the artist dating from 1959 into 1961 on view this autumn at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea that were so unlike the three-dimensional constructions the artist would soon fabricate.
Robert Motherwell was a multi-hyphenate artist. He’s entered art history books as the youngest and best educated of the first wave of Abstract Expressionists. But Motherwell also enjoyed a significant career as the editor of the “Documents of Modern Art” series, among other publications, and as a Hunter College professor.
The David Smith show on view at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown outpost is both lively and unusual.
Sculptures, installations, assemblages, photographs, and other works executed by Giuseppe Penone and his Arte Povera colleagues often look off-kilter and slightly madcap. Think DIY. Or picture these Italian artists, active since the late 1960s and early ’70s, stranded on a deserted island and joyously making art from found materials.
In 1969, Georg Baselitz, then a 31-year-old artist based in southwest Germany, began painting people, places, and things upside down. Over the course of the following decades, his art changed considerably. Nevertheless, he still inverts his subjects. This practice, coupled with existential themes, remains the hallmark of his art.
Because many of his figures appear in settings with backyard swimming pools or the ocean, a range of blues dominates his works. Frequently, his subjects are more memorable than his technique.
As it is, Sillman is a gamechanger. Her paintings and drawings reframe long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction, a style that enjoyed its golden age in America a half century ago during the 1960s.
Josh Smith has done it again. With a palette favoring lilac, tangerine, lime, and citron, he has transformed a relatively bland subject into a fevered dreamscape.
Michael Williams was among the unlucky artists who had a solo show shuttered when New York went into lockdown in mid-March. On view for only two weeks, his exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea featured 11 large paintings and five small collages. While these works are now accessible on the internet, this isn’t an ideal way to view them—partly because of the way they were made, and partly because his installation was integral to how you respond to his art.
Sturm und Drang, a solo show from Nicole Eisenman that’s on view at The Contemporary Austin through August 16, features representative examples of her art. No matter the medium, she excels. Besides her skill at making things, she forcefully expresses herself with aplomb, conviction, empathy, bravado, and a gift for visual storytelling.
Laura Hoptman is an old hand at finding new talent. Time and again, Hoptman has shown that she has a good eye, a searching intelligence, and a sense of history. Years ago, during her first stint at the Museum of Modern Art, she introduced many of us to Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, and Luc Tuymans.
Before the Internet and social media, it was easier to read about Jackson Pollock ’51 than it was to see the film Hans Namuth directed and Paul Falkenberg produced.
While art criticism languishes in the doldrums, I get my information on who to watch, what to read, must see shows, and related matters from Twitter and Facebook. These two networking services, which I consult throughout the day on my iPad and my iPhone5, have become indispensable sources of information for a variety of reasons.