Christie’s record breaking three-day auction of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Berge, earned more than $484 million, but has not escaped controversy. Two bronze fountainheads from the auction, taken from China’s Summer Imperial Palace in 1860, sold for $18 million each to a telephone bidder, who remained anonymous at the … Continued

In a Lifetime Channel biopic set to air later this year, Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen star as the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O’Keefe. The two will be working together again in an art related project in the Broadway production of Michael Jacobs’ play “Impressionism”, much of which, is set in a … Continued

Willoughby Sharp leaves a legacy that will take many years to catalogue and integrate into the annals of the art world.  His wife, the inestimable Pamela Seymour Smith Sharp, will do us all a great service in meeting this task with her keen grace and insight.  Like few of his contemporaries, the late self proclaimed … Continued

Art historians usually feel no need to look back at the history of art history. Michael Podro took a different view. He believed that a way to understand visual art was to look critically at the history of art history. His first book The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (1972) provides … Continued

Even for seasoned navigators, there’s a lot of getting lost to be done in Miami, with everything oriented NE, NW, condo towers being built everywhere blocking one-way streets. Looking for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) near downtown, we first passed a group of boxy nightclub buildings. These are the after-hours places, which pick up … Continued

R.B. Kitaj’s work broke a modernist taboo – before it became fashionable to do so – by being unabashedly literary. Hilton Kramer once complained that his paintings were “littered with ideas.” But as referential as he could be, Kitaj was always a consummately visual artist.

Eighteen experts talk with Brian Appel on the $1,248,000 Richard Prince photograph that has set a new world auction record for photography. “There wasn’t really a plan. I’ve never been included in any photography based survey, museum show, photo magazine. I’ve heard that Peter Galassi hates my work. That he would never acknowledge it in … Continued

Remarks delivered at a memorial for the artist at St. Marks in the Bowerie

Included now in “The Shaped Canvas, Revisited,” at Luxembourg & Dayan, Parrino was one of the form’s great innovators.

A version of this obituary was published in the London Independent on October 20, 2004 Fermin Rocker himself had recognized that his current show at the Chambers Gallery in London would be his last. For some time he had been tired. His eyes were not as good as they were, and walking the few yards to … Continued