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Review: Nicole Eisenman’s 'Al-ugh-ories'
To understand “Ale-ugh-ories,” Nicole Eisenman’s winning exhibition at the New Museum, it helps to be versed in the history of The Thing. I refer to the Marvel comic-book hero, the one whose skin is...
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Review: Holy Moholy!
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was born in Hungary and died in Chicago, in 1946, was a multi-media artist before the term existed. Critics disagree over whether he did his best work as a) a painter who...
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Review: Stuart Davis at the Whtiney
Stuart Davis, who was born in in 1892, the son of two artists, was an appealing figure. In the 1920s, when New York was still regarded as a cultural backwater compared to Paris, he set about to improve...
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Review: Photo Center Moves to the Bowery, But Has No Room for Pictures of Bums
The International Center of Photography, which is known affectionately among New Yorkers as the ICP, has just acquired a new home on the Bowery. The good news is that it has organized an exhibition...
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Review: Diane Arbus’s Baby Photographs
“Diane Arbus: in the beginning,” the darkly mesmerizing show currently on view at the Met Breuer outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together a selection of so-called early photographs....
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Review: A Brave Show on Art and AIDS
If you have never been to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, this is the time to ride the D train up to the Grand Concourse and look around.The museum’s current exhibition, “Art AIDS America,” is a must-see...
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Review: Carmen Herrera is No Grandma Moses, Which Is a Good Thing
If you’ve never heard of Carmen Herrera, a Cuban-born, New York painter who happens to be 101-years-old, you can be forgiven. Virtually no one has seen her work in depth. She did not sell her first...
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Review: 50 Shades of White
The Agnes Martin retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is one of the two or three best museum shows in New York this season. It makes you aware, among other things, of a clumsy...
View Article“Gay Gotham” Is a Catchy Title for an Art Show
“Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York,” a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, is an ambitious undertaking. It seeks to celebrate the achievements of gay artists in New...
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Review: Max Beckmann’s Brief But Intense New York Years
Max Beckmann was, by any measure, the greatest German artist of the 20th century. Yet he has never had the allure of his European compatriots Picasso and Matisse, perhaps because he was never a...
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Review: Kerry James Marshall Proves It
In the 1990s, “identity art” was a maligning phrase among mainstream critics. It referred to art that emphasized racial or sexual indignity at the expense of aesthetic content. Such art sprang from...
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Review: Pipilotti Rist Finds her Garden of Eden in Pixel Dots
Video art might seem too new to claim its own history, but Pipilotti Rist, a Zurich-based artist of 54, is one of the medium’s now-historic pioneers. In “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest,” her buoyant and...
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Review: The Rich Dadaist
Francis Picabia’s career has long been split into opposing halves. He was one of the founders of the Dada movement in the years following World War I, and his early paintings and drawings were...
View ArticleReview: Thinking about the Art World Post-Hillary
A confession: It took me years to warm to the virtues of identity art.In the 1990s, when identity politics began infiltrating the art world, I saw them as a distraction. It seemed odd to want to label...
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Winter Culture Scene: Art
Deborah Solomon, WNYC art critic and the author of American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), talks about some of the art worth bundling up for this winter....
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Review: Remembering the Tenth Street Galleries
Can we ever go back to Tenth Street? Probably not. I refer not to a specific place but to a vanished era in New York’s cultural history, a romantic time when the art scene was still centered in...
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Review: The Whitney Showcases The Painting of the ‘80s
When the Whitney Museum of American Art re-opened in 2015 with a humongous and fascinating survey of its permanent collection, there were, inevitably, some omissions. Where was Ross Bleckner, for...
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REVIEW: Raymond Pettibon as the Underground Man.
For a few years now, the New York Public Library has been selling tote bags bearing an inscription from the artist Raymond Pettibon. “Good prose is of no harm,” it says, above an image of two clowns....
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Review: A Fresh Glimpse at J.M.W. Turner
Some artists are beloved for their late works, none more so than J.M.W. Turner. The British painter, who flourished in London in the first half of the 19th century, is celebrated for the daringly...
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Review: The Forgotten Expressionist
Alexei Jawlensky was one of the pioneers of modern art, but he remains less known than many of his artist-friends. He died in Germany, in 1941, and he is just now having his first full-dress...
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