Michael Fried,who shot to intellectual stardom in 1967 with an essay in Artforum called "Art and Objecthood," is an intimidating writer. He looks very closely. He has passionate feelings about what he sees. And he shapes his impressions into a theory ...
The exhibition of Picasso's late work at the Gagosian Gallery this spring was a phenomenon. Day after day, Gagosian's huge space on West 21st Street attracted a remarkably heterogeneous public, a mix of artists, art students, Brooklyn hipsters, ...
With the news of Merce Cunningham's death has come a blizzard of wonderful photographic portraits of the dancer in action. He was a great camera subject, often caught in mid-flight, lyrical yet hyperbolic, arrestingly individualistic. To this ...
Is there such a thing as a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon. His canvases, ...
Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture -- J. Paul Getty Museum Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California -- J. Paul Getty Museum Back when I was in college, there was a theory that the way to get a ...
Step into room 316 of the 42nd Street library any day of the week and you will find a dozen or more people slowly making their way through "Nabokov Under Glass," a salute to the writer, who was born 100 years ago, on April 23, 1899. Nabokov enthusiasts ...
There is a tropical heat in Pierre Bonnard's late paintings. This subtle hedonist, a contemplative spirit with king-sized obsessions, regards the colors on his palette as objects of delectation. Each stroke of alizarin or orange or green paint that he ...
Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater Jewish Museum The wheel of fashion, which turned Marc Chagall and Georges Rouault into has-beens a few decades ago, is turning again. These two misunderstood moderns are being taken seriously. The ...
What is American about American art? Or American music? Or American literature? These venerable questions--to which there are certainly no simple answers and probably no definitive answers--have been on my mind for the past few weeks, since Barack ...
Essay collections have always been among my favorite books. And the collections I like the most are by no means devoted to the visual arts. One of this year's revelations is Ballet's Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911-1925, by ...
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