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latest postings:Richard Vine's New China New Art, Willoughby Sharp, Magdalena Abakanowicz, William Tillyer, Max Weber, Cynthia Saltzman's Old Masters New World, David Stern, Wang Hui, Miguel Trelles, Lorna Simpson, Blakelock, Willard Boepple, Zero in New York, Hilary Brace, Daniel Hesidence

the online magazine of art and ideas 

Publisher & Editor David Cohen
Associate Publisher Laurie Frick Associate Editor Eric Gelber
Contributing Editors Reuben Baron, Joan Boykoff Baron, David Carrier, Joe Fyfe
Deborah Garwood, Jonathan Goodman, John Goodrich
Contributing Writer (auction reports) Brian Appel
Contributing Writer (Internet art) Amber Ladd
Editorial Assistant Gabbe Grodin Administrative Assistant Gili Levi

see articles for image credits; some cover images are details

Marlene Dumas and Elizabeth Peyton
BY DAVID COHEN

Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton

posted 12/22/2008 DIANE THODOS on Magdalena Abakanowicz at Northwestern University, Illinois
	These monumental drawings consist of interwoven lines made with charcoal or gouache that tangle and bind together to form strange organic beings. Forms allude to a tree trunk, a human torso, a flower, or an insect; they explore the ambivalence between nature’s capacity to produce the mysterious pulsating of life which is simultaneously haunted by the treachery of  death.

MORGAN TAYLOR on Alexi Worth at DC Moore
	The grainy, opaque paint surfaces and austere earth palette bespeak an unfashionably non-ironic desire to produce ‘quality’ paintings. And there are learned references and quotations from art history and photography.

JOHN GOODRICH on Max Weber at Gerald Peters
	Woman Holding Tablet (1946) pleasingly and convincingly locates a seated figure within a geometric environment, with ochre tints and warm blacks set deftly against notes of bright coral and medium blue. The rather strenuous engineering of the pose and surroundings, however, give the impression of an exercise – a demonstration of the plastic re-creation of a generic event.

posted 12/19/2008 DAVID COHEN on William Tillyer at Jacobson Howard
	There are few abstract painters at work today who manage to push both metaphor and literalism so hard, simultaneously, as William Tillyer.

posted 12/16/2008 JOEL SILVERSTEIN on David Stern at Yeshiva University Museum
	Stern’s phenomenological angst registers as a kind of kinetic painterly energy palpably present between the viewer and the figures depicted.  This is true despite the way the paint remains defiantly clogged and overtly physical. In this respect, the paintings strain against the nature of matter, like a wounded lion in an Assyrian bas relief which writhes against its own mortality.

posted 12/14/2008 DAVID CARRIER on Wang Hui at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
	The attractiveness of the towering, tree covered mountains in Landscape after Wang Meng’s “Travelers amid Autumn Mountains” is self-evident. But if you cannot also see how this is a copy of a fourteen century imitation of Dong Yuan’s 10th century Travelers amid Autumn Mountains, then who knows what you are missing.

posted 11/28/2008 DAVID BRODY on Hilary Brace at Edward Thorp
	At first the eye is fooled – one thinks one is looking at silvery photographs of sublime cloudscapes shot from an airplane above an uninhabited wilderness. Closer examination reveals the patient, expert mark of the hand, as well as an improvisatory richness of imagination that, while consistently illusionistic, is decidedly otherworldly.

posted 11/28/2008 STEPHEN MAINE on Daniel Hesidence at Feature
	The artist softens his vigorous brushwork using a blending brush, a staple of the realist painter’s tool kit, relying too heavily on an admixture of white to sidestep the chromatic muddiness that would otherwise ensue. In places this unexpected technique imparts a smeary appearance, while elsewhere the forms are so hairy-looking you want to take a big comb to them.

posted 12/9/2008 MERVE UNSAL on Lorna Simpson at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freemans
	The tensions between intimate and public, between information and interpretation, in Simpson's drawings of women's hair take on a different meaning in a second body of work in what the artist calls the “orchestrated theatrical disaster” of war.

posted 12/4/2008 PIRI HALASZ on Willard Boepple at Lori Bookstein
	The author finds unexpected links between Boepple and the Surrealist phase of Alberto Giacometti

posted 12/4/2008 DREW LOWENSTEIN on Unknown Blakelock at the National Academy Museum
	In addition to his spontaneous brushstrokes, Blakelock explores a decalcomania-like technique of load, press, smear, and lift. This emphatically material-based process creates a raised, textural web of paint activity with a few scattered reds, oranges and yellows flecking a surface that is eerily similar to Jackson Pollock’s and as interesting to ponder.

posted 12/4/2008 BRYAN BALLA on Zero in New York at Sperone Westwater
	Working outside the gallery system, these artists made single-evening exhibitions, often in their own studios, issuing manifestos with these events.   While some artists involved with Zero, like Lucio Fontana, are well recognized in America, this is the first survey of the lesser-known group in the States.

posted 11/17/2008 PIRI HALASZ on Frankenthaler at Eighty at Knoedler

A "pink lady" is a cocktail made with gin, Grenadine, cream and egg white—the gin packs a punch masked by the more ladylike ingredients. The punch in this painting lies in how its image, suggesting (among much else) an orchid and a human heart, boils upward and outward, from its slate-blue core through the billowing peach and fuchsia of its sides to the splattering blast of blue and reds at the top.

posted 12/12/2008 JONATHAN GOODMAN on Miguel Trelles at the Gabarron Foundation
	Much of his earlier work has been involved in reconciling his interests in Chinese traditional painting with his very contemporary reading of his own outsider status as a bilingual Latino artist in America.

November 2008

SEAN SCULLY on Giorgio Morandi at the Metropolitan Museum

DAVID CARRIER on Liza Lou at L&M Arts

JONATHAN GOODMAN on Jackie Winsor at Paula Cooper

JOHN GOODRICH on Louisa Matthiasdottir at Tibor de Nagy

JENNIFER RILEY on Cora Cohen at Michael Steinberg

JOHN ZINSSER on Mary Heilmann at the New Museum

DAVID CARRIER on Abstract Expressionism: A World Elsewhere, curated by David Anfam, at Haunch of Venison

NORA GRIFFIN on Baker Overstreet at Fredericks & Freiser

JONATHAN GOODMAN on Ching Ho Cheng at Shepherd & Derom

ROBIN HILL in conversation with Theodora Varnay-Jones about her work

DAVID CARRIER on Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles

October 2008

DAVID COHEN on Cecily Brown at Gagosian

JOHN ZINSSER on Untitled (Vicarious) curated by Tom Duncan at Gagosian

CATHY NAN QUINLAN on Marvin Gates at Bowery

DAVID CARRIER on Nick Miller at the New York Studio School

DAVID CARRIER on Vincent Van Gogh: The Colors of Night at the Museum of Modern Art, and to: Night: Contemporary Representations of the Night at Hunter College

JOE FYFE on Janet Malcolm at Lori Bookstein

JAMES SCARBOROUGH on Julian Hoeber at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

ARCHIVES

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NEW YEAR'S QUIZ
DO YOU KNOW YOUR ART HOUNDS?

This poster for a 1976 exhibition of the Skowhegan School featuring Dog at Duck Trap by Alex Katz portrays Sunny, the Katz family dog who also sports the cover of Robert Rosenblum's classic art historical study, The Dog in Art: From Rococo to Postmodernism, a copy of which awaits the first reader to tally our sampling of artworld hounds and their two-legged companions. click Sunny to play

AUDIO
THE REVIEW PANEL
November 2008

Ron Gorchov

Ana Finel Honigman, Joe Fyfe and Mario Naves join David Cohen to review Lothar Baumgarten, Sue Coe, Ron Gorchov and Elizabeth Peyton

PIC OF THE DAY
December 24, 2008

Dona Nelson Night Studio 2008

Cheesecloth and acrylic mediums on canvas, 83-1/2 x 84 inches. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

This small group show, up through February 1, of five works by four artists at the Thomas Erben Gallery is best characterized by the adage, quality over quantity. Painter’s painter Dona Nelson aggressively questions her medium's two dimensional format by turning her painting into a sculptural installation.  She sets up spatial rythms for the others in the show: Hadassah Emmerich, Chitra Ganesh and Haeri Yoo. A powerful symmetry emerges among the diverse visual perspectives and cultures unearthed by these works.

LARA TAUBMAN

PRIOR PICS

BOOK REVIEW
JONATHAN GOODMAN on New China New Art by Richard Vine

Even when Ai went so far as to deliberately drop a Han dynasty urn, Vine holds back from any judgemental attitude. 

Tribute to Willoughby Sharp
by TOBEY CROCKETT

In addition to nurturing the careers of several generations of artists, Sharp also mentored all manner of young writers, gallery assistants who learned the ropes under his raucous tutelage, denizens of the demi monde surrounding the art and club scene of the East Village explosion, and numerous collectors, all of whom gained a great deal of insight and a sense of historical continuum by simply hanging around while Sharp put it all together, ruminating out loud in a semi-continuous conversation that lasted for several decades.

BOOK REVIEW
DAVID CARRIER on Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures by Cynthia Saltzman

Cynthia Saltzman, a marvelously writerly writer, has studied the literature, read in the archives, and talked to the specialists. Her very unacademic narrative tells how Henry Gurdon Marquand, J. Pierpoint Morgan, the Havemeyers, Henry Clark Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardner, in collaboration with Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry and various dealers, purchased art wisely and very ambitiously.

IMAGE ESSAY
FRACTURED WITNESS
by David Cohen

Alexey Kallima [detail]

A number of recent shows accentuated the odd mix of remoteness and involvement artists evidently experience about war when they are not at the "actual" front. This image essay, the first of a new feature at artcritical, looks at exhibitions of Susanna Coffey, Martha Rosler, Eyal Danieli and Alexey Kallima