Clik here to view.
Danish Moderns
After all the talking in the audience dies down, one can begin to make out some whispering voices from behind the screen. Then a couple of footsteps can be heard, something that is dropped on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sally Michel: Every Color Loves Every Color
Have you ever looked at a Matisse or a Derain and noticed how colors in their paintings seem to compete with each for the viewer's attention? It was for this characteristic that a critic derisively...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tomma Abts: A Perfect Enigma
Abts practices what some critics refer to as geometric abstraction (think of Piet Mondrian's later works such as Broadway Boogie Woogie), opposing it to expressive abstraction as represented by the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clarice Lispector Interrogates The World
"Be careful with Clarice. It's not literature. It's witchcraft." - anonymousClarice Lispector (1920-1977) was a writer whose work is as central to the literature of Brazil as Borges to Argentina or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ruby Sky Stiler: Holding Up The Sky
"When the skies are going to fall, fall they will..." - excerpt from "The Revolutionary" by David Herbert LawrenceShe stares out at us holding up the weight of ages.At first glance, it seems odd...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dahlia: A Flower Of Late Summer
When they appear in August, dahlias are like many-petaled suns: large, round, and radiating fructiferous color. This is no flight of fancy; for centuries Mexicans (the dahlia's native country) have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paradise For A Dime
"You, wild foam. You, good-for-nothing snail, you who don't love me." - excerpt from "Still?" by Wassily Kandinsky, translated by Elizabeth R. Napier from Sounds, New Haven, Yale University Press:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Phrasikleia: An Unmarried Woman
"I would not touch the sky with both hands." - Sappho, as translated from the Greek by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter: Fragment of Sappho, New York: Alfred A, Knopf: 2002."Kore I must be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Not A Material Girl: Hilma af Klint
Nothing unprecedented about an artist painting on commission unless the artist is Hilma af Klint. Af Klint and four like-minded friends, also female artists, attempted to contact the spirit world...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Brilliant Corner: Van Gogh's Garden with Butterflies
When Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Paris in March, 1886 it was for the homeliest of reasons. Too poor to pay the rent in Antwerp, he moved in with his brother Theo who was already working for the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I Say It's A Poodle !
At the time William Baziotes painted Shadow in 1951 he was moving away from applying paint to canvas by brush and its visible strokes as building blocks of the picture. What gives an image like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Roger de La Fresnaye: A Cheerful Cubist
When Daniel Henry Kahnweiler decreed that great artists make art dealers great he was being disingenuous. The German-born French art dealer not only represented Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris from his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Like Oil And Water: A Color Lithograph by Louis LaBrie
Patterns in nature layered and reflected in water, like a cascade of regressing mirror images become what all two dimensional images are at their origins: abstractions. Scaly bark on trees seen...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Serena Perrone: Magic Mountains
When I was six years old I was given a book on world geography for my birthday. Through it I discovered the existence of volcanoes, something so much at odds with what I knew of the familiar terrain...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mercedes Matter: Expressive In The Abstract
Against a neutral background of negative space, yellows, oranges, and purples vie for prominence in Colors of Autumn by Mercedes Matter. The abstraction of the image allows us to contemplate changes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Working Girls: 'Tis The Season To be Hard-Boiled
A plane crashes into your boudoir? These things happen. A girl needs to finish her makeup before she greets the day; this is the spirit of the hard-boiled. A school girl's riddle from my mother's...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From An Old House At Vetheuil: Joan Mitchell
La grande vallee XIv, painted in 1983, comes closer than any other painting by Joan Mitchell that shows her affinity with Claude Monet. Like the Frenchman, who eliminated the horizon and the sky in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
O Tannenbaum
It is good to be reminded that a Christmas tree can also be a humble sign of hope and joy. This photograph by the eminent American Walker Evans (1903-1975) is an instant color print of a fitting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Marche de Noel
So famous are the Christmas markets of Bolzano that the city bears the nickname 'the Italian Capitol of Christmas.' Market fairs have been held in Bolzano ever since the northern city was annexed by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Odilon Redon & The Renaissance Portrait
She could be descended from a Renaissance woman, or at least the portrait of one. Odilon Redon's Madame Arthur Fontaine (Marie Escudier) was made in 1903 but its subject is presented with all the...
View Article