Multireferential Imagery
This essay is an extract from A Memoir of Creativity: abstract painting, politics and the media, 1956-2008 published by iUniverse, 2009. The book unites art theory, politics, journalism and personal memoir. At its heart lies the author’s theory of abstract art, that instead of being non-representational, it constitutes a “multireferential” form of representation.
Jack Bush: Works on Paper at the New York Studio School
What most truly characterizes Bush’s mature work is a seriousness, even a gravitas that amounts to a truly Olympian detachment.
The Art Critic by Peter Plagens
I’ve long felt that Peter Plagens and I had a community of interest, as we’ve both written about art for weekly newsmagazines (he for Newsweek, I for Time, having preceded Robert Hughes in that slot). Imagine my delight when I learned last August that Plagens was publishing his second novel, The Art Critic, in 24 installments on artnet! Twenty-four…
Willard Boepple: Looms at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
The author finds unexpected links between Boepple and the Surrealist phase of Alberto Giacometti
Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades at Knoedler & Company
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.
First Annual Governor’s Island Art Fair, Organized by 4heads Collective
The art fair is billed as “organized entirely by artists, for artists—and the public’s enjoyment.” What a pleasant change of pace from most of our big art fairs, especially the various Armory Shows, which are organized by dealers and have nothing but booths named for dealers.
Jilaine Jones: Sculpture
Wonder World is built of hard steel rods, bars and sheet steel that interact with somewhat more malleable slabs and blocks of concrete and rock board. The whole is tough, hard, aggressive and muscular—yet also slender, graceful, sensitive and wise.
Earning His Stripes: Kenneth Noland in the ‘60s
The forms in Noland’s paintings are usually dismissed as mere devices to enable him to explore color, but the lines and shapes of these paintings have a basis in the natural world as well. They add to the feelings of harmony and serenity that these paintings project, while titles like “Via Light” and “Via Shimmer” suggest Roman roads and air mail stickers, thus ideas of travel and motion and speed.
