Frieze LA ’24

Four hours on VIP Thursday at the 2024 iteration of Frieze LA left me unqualified to make informed judgments but still with reactions, however superficial. The initial reaction, as often at such a fair, was being overwhelmed. The crowd was huge, the booths were packed atop each other and there was no easy way to […]

LACMA

A quick shout-out to LACMA for putting on at least four very interesting temporary exhibitions while the main campus is closed for construction (2024 seems an optimistic completion date). The main attraction for me was the show of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) that came from the Crocker in Sacramento and is, apparently, the first […]

New York in March ’23

A short week in Manhattan gave me a chance to catch up on some shows between the fall and spring blockbusters. I was looking forward to “Beyond the Light” at the Met, because I’m a recent fan of the Danish 19th century, the Golden Age of Eckersberg, Kobke, Rorbye and up to Hammershoi. Unfortunately, the […]

More Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer painted people, but he was not a portraitist. He painted mountains and rivers, but he was not a landscape artist. He painted activities, but he was not a genre artist. In 19th-century American art, there was no one like him. He stands alone. He was a storyteller, but he rarely told you what […]

Homer at the Met

Ever since the George Floyd tragedy, cultural and media institutions have been making up for a century of neglect by spotlighting Black-related art and artists. The relatively staid Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has ridden the wave, first with a new “Afrofuturist” period room, then a dossier exhibition around Why Born Enslaved!, a […]

Jasper Johns

The opening galleries at both the Whitney and Philadelphia were full of people and Jasper Johns’s greatest hits from the late ’50s: targets, flags, numbers and maps. By the end, the crowds had dissipated and one wondered if the same could be said for Johns’s art. I admit that I had struggled, during the latter […]

New York Notes

Our first two weeks in Manhattan post-pandemic put me back in touch with great art. I had no computer and I failed to take notes, so the impressions that follow will be imprecise and subject to correction and emendation when we spend more time in New York in the fall. The Frick Madison. The big news […]

Art in London

I spent a week in London looking at art, revisiting old friends and discovering some new. The Felix Vallotton show at the Royal Academy – coming to the Met later this fall – was a revelation. With only 50 paintings and an approximately equal number of prints, it covered  the Swiss artist’s career coherently and completely. […]

Museum Exhibitions ’18

Over May and June of this year I’ve had occasion to visit a half-dozen special exhibitions, from the spectacular to the routine to the overstuffed. Far and away the best, and perhaps the best I’ve ever seen, was “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty,” designed by Robert Wilson. Each gallery was theatrically lit, with […]

Paintings at the Met – 18th Century

613. French Women Best: Marie Denise Villers, Marie Josephine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (1801). Of all the eyes looking at me in this gallery, hers are the ones that hold me. Light and shadow define the plain dress and spartan room, and we see a courting couple through a broken window pane. The composition is […]