New York ’23 – Spring

Just as the Guggenheim vaulted Hilda Am Klimt from obscurity to the canon in 2019, it has put on a retrospective for Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) that will require her future inclusion in any survey of 20th-century abstraction, and not just listings of female or South American artists. With her wire sculptures she invented not just […]

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 […]

ArtNotes Fall ’22

Wolfgang Tillmans MoMA’s  “members field guide” compares  the emotional impact of a wall of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans to a “perfect pop song,” which makes me feel not so out of it, as many a “perfect pop song” also leaves me cold. The just-deceased Peter Schjeldahl calls Tillmans a “genius” in his New Yorker review, […]

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 […]

American Art at SBMA

The post-van Gogh rehang of the permanent galleries at SBMA features a selection of largely 19th-century American painting (perhaps in fulfillment of the 1958 commitment to Preston Morton in consideration of her gift of 50 paintings). While maybe a third were seen in the 2012 exhibition, “Scenery, Story, Spirit,” most of the others are new […]

NY Art Notes ’22

Two months away from Santa Barbara were never far from art, and although it is excruciatingly difficult to translate visual experiences into words, I can at least record my reactions as I recall them. First, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is my home base away from home, a five-minute walk from our apartment on 79th […]

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 […]

Van Gogh in Santa Barbara

The exhibition “Through Vincent’s Eyes” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art disabused me of two long-held ideas about Van Gogh’s art: 1. That his style was a reaction to Impressionism, and 2. That he never painted a bad picture. Before I get into my critique, however, I should commend curator Eik Kahng and the […]

Art Highlights of 2021

Museum- and gallery-going were necessarily down in 2021, thanks to Covid, but we were fortunate to have our base in New York and family in San Francisco, giving us a chance to catch some of the season’s big shows and rub shoulders with smaller venues along the way.  In retrospect, the year doesn’t look so […]

Philadelphia Museum of Art

I wondered, as I wandered through the many galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, how long will we have this kind of encyclopedic, time-specific museum? Or more to the point, how long will we have them outside New York and a few other world capitals? You have to remember that the encyclopedic museum (EM) […]