January 10, 2012
At just the moment, midway down the ramp of the Guggenheim, when the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective installation, All, began to lose its amusing edge and spectacular novelty, and become tiresome, I was led off-ramp, off-track by my friend Susan Bee who had escaped through a small portal to see Kandinsky’s Painting with White Border, a [...]
Posted in art, painting, sculpture | Tagged artists' writings, Grahame Wienbren, Maurizio Cattelan, Vassily Kandinsky
January 1, 2012
I woke up one morning this week, walked into my studio while still half asleep, looked around and thought, my work is just not enough. This may not seem like a good start to a New Year of positive thinking, but I immediately understood that this thought, surging from the liminal space between sleep and [...]
Posted in art, painting, sculpture | Tagged African art, Andrea Mantegna, Michael Baxandall, painting, portraiture, Renaissance art, Sandro Botticelli
June 6, 2011
This post is inspired by two aspects of the life of the artist. First, friendships are very important to artists, perhaps because the nature of being an artist often includes necessary aloneness in the making, the thinking, or the ideological position, within an atmosphere of bracing but sometimes corrosive competitiveness so that it is essential [...]
Posted in art, sculpture | Tagged Emma Bee Bernstein, Hermine Ford, Ilya Schor, Jack Tworkov, Mimi Gross, Resia Schor, Sarah Wells, Susan Bee
October 3, 2010
The necessity of being perceived as having a brand at first glance seems to be specific to our time: in politics you’ll hear that President Obama can’t do such and such because it would go against “The Brand.” Brand Obama or Brand Brad Pitt can’t be altered without entering into a Bermuda triangle of non-recognition [...]
Posted in art, painting, sculpture | Tagged Abstract Expressionism, Ad Reinhardt, Arshile Gorki, Barnett Newman, Clement Greenberg, David Smith, Jack Tworkov, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, MoMA, Norman Kleeblatt, painting, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning
September 4, 2010
I wrote this appreciation of Stephan von Huene, the American sculptor later based in Germany, upon the publication of a beautiful catalogue of “Tune the World,” his retrospective exhibition at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, 2002-2003. Living in New York City I could have only the diminished pleasure of reading the catalogue, Stephan von Huene, Resounding Sculptures, [...]
Posted in art, General, sculpture | Tagged CalArts, CalArts Feminist Art Program, sculpture, Stephan von Huene, Teaching Contradiction
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