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
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| Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton |
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posted 12/22/2008
DIANE THODOS on Magdalena Abakanowicz at Northwestern University, Illinois |
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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.
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| MORGAN TAYLOR on Alexi Worth at DC Moore |
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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.
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| JOHN GOODRICH on Max Weber at Gerald Peters |
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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.
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posted 12/19/2008
DAVID COHEN on William Tillyer at Jacobson Howard |
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There are few abstract painters at work today who manage to push both metaphor and literalism so hard, simultaneously, as William Tillyer.
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posted 12/16/2008
JOEL SILVERSTEIN on David Stern at Yeshiva University Museum |
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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.
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posted 12/14/2008
DAVID CARRIER on Wang Hui at the Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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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 |
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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.
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posted 11/28/2008
STEPHEN MAINE on Daniel Hesidence at Feature |
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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.
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posted 12/9/2008
MERVE UNSAL on Lorna Simpson at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freemans |
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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.
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posted 12/4/2008
DREW LOWENSTEIN on Unknown Blakelock at the National Academy Museum |
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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.
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posted 12/4/2008
BRYAN BALLA on Zero in New York at Sperone Westwater |
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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.
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posted 11/17/2008
PIRI HALASZ on Frankenthaler at Eighty at Knoedler |
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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.
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posted 12/12/2008
JONATHAN GOODMAN on Miguel Trelles at the Gabarron Foundation |
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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
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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
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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
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