12 October 2009 | Books, Modern
Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) and Yve-Alain Bois’s Painting as Model (1991) have just received Portuguese translations. A reviewer for the Brazilian newspaper Estadao takes them to be representative of two opposing views of American modernism.
12 October 2009 | Modern
The Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute have released a new online edition of van Gogh’s letters: The edition, based on fifteen years of research, was edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker … For each of the 902 letters the edition gives a transcription of the original Dutch or French text, [...]
9 September 2009 | Modern, Museums
Hamburg is hosting an exhibition on Rosa Schapire, the art historian, feminist and champion of Die Bruecke (she arranged Karl Schmidt-Rottluff‘s first solo show). She battled sexism and anti-Semitism to become a significant scholar and collector, without the help of an inheritance or a rich husband.
At Tate Modern through May 17, Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism has received several interested reviews.
29 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Taipei Times interviews Pompidou chief curator Didier Ottinger about Arcadie, his exhibition of modern art whose “main theme investigates Arcadia, a region in central Greece that has taken on mythological resonance as a utopian land of abundance. Each of the exhibit¡on’s 10 sub-themes addresses a detail of The Arcadian Shepherds by Renaissance painter Nicolas [...]
26 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Seventy of van Gogh’s landscapes from the late 1880s are on view through September in Basel’s Kunstmuseum, in an exhibition billing itself as “the most important European art event in 2009″ and expecting a half-million visitors…
25 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Wrestling with the towering yet ambiguous figure of Rodin, sculptors tried for a newly austere, concise synthesis in the years leading up to the Great War — the subject of a thoughtful exhibition by Catherine Chevillot at the Musée d’Orsay. Reviews are by Philippe Dagen in Le Monde (“Picasso is missing…Lehmbruck is the leading figure”), [...]
20 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Pierre Bonnard’s late interiors, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, attracted a number of approving reviews…
13 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Tate Britain has reconstructed William Blake’s famously unheralded 1809 exhibition (it attracted only one review and no sales). Laura Cumming in the Observer is struck by Blake’s aesthetic: Here are the streaming bodies – word made flesh – the long robes, loose hair, thunderclaps and starbursts. Here are the weightless figures in their graphic [...]
27 March 2009 | Modern
Modern Art Notes interviews TJ Clark, who is presenting this year’s National Gallery of Art Mellon Lectures, focusing on 1920s Picasso as well as Guernica: These lectures are an attempt to extract Pablo Picasso from a biographic equation: ‘Picture C equals Lover Y,’ and that’s what you need to know … Cubism now, to me [...]
28 February 2009 | Conferences, Medieval, Modern, Renaissance
Allyson Drucker reports from CAA: You would have been hard-pressed to find the geographic and temporal boundaries that academics have traditionally abided by in two of this morning’s sessions where, instead, panelists focused on the points of intersection among art and artists hailing from different milieux. At “The International Contribution to Renaissance and Baroque Art” [...]
2 February 2009 | Books, Modern, Teaching
Victoria Laurie of The Australian writes about Art & Today, a new survey by Eleanor Heartney of contemporary art from the last three decades, which is organized not by chronology, country, medium, style, or “ism”: “One of the big changes I would say in the past 25 years is that art is much less about [...]
30 January 2009 | Modern
The Times of London writes on the re-attribution of The Colossus: “After a seven-month investigation, experts at the Prado gallery in Madrid came to the reluctant conclusion that the masterpiece was probably the work of Asensio Juliá, one of Goya’s assistants … the Prado started an investigation last year [upon] the discovery of the initials [...]
29 January 2009 | Books, Modern
In The American Scientist, a physicist reviews Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, edited by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber: Although Einstein denied a connection between music and his modes of thinking about science, he did claim that his thought patterns were highly [...]
21 January 2009 | Conferences, Modern
Last Friday marked the 100th birthday of Clement Greenberg. You hadn’t heard? Almost no one marked the occasion. In Die Welt, Ulf Poschardt wrote a wistful reminiscence. This April, Harvard will host a two-day symposium, “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art”: Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: avant-garde and [...]
21 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
From Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann: Why do people become painters? In two out of three cases, suspected the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, to overcompensate for a congenital sight defect. That’s hard to prove. Yet there is no doubt that Claude Monet had serious eye problems in the last two decades of his life. The [...]
18 November 2008 | Modern
From the Baltimore Sun: Before she passed away Saturday after a long illness, Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world and a longtime Baltimore resident, usually did. “There will be no [...]
13 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
It’s caviar for modern art skeptics: Tate Modern hung Rothkos on their side and it made so little difference that barely anyone noticed. The truth of the matter is a bit more complex. From The Times of London: Curators of the blockbuster Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern in London have displayed two of the artist’s [...]
30 April 2008 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the May 2008 issue of Art in America, Sue Taylor writes on recent histories of the erotic image. She dives into scandal straight away, of the scholarly kind: In his 1987 Secret Museum, a lively and polemical history of pornography, Walter Kendrick shows how Western culture is still riven by a debate begun in [...]
Die Welt notes that Alfred Weidinger’s new catalogue raisonné of Gustav Klimt’s paintings (which was selected as the best art book of the year by Frank Whitford in The Times of London and by Tom Rosenthal in The Independent) has come under attack from fellow Klimt scholar Otmar Rychlik.
