While American art grew bolder, larger, louder, and more ironic, David Aronson was mystical, introspective, and poetic.
Book Review: Artist Mark Rothko — The Painter as Guru
Biographer Annie Cohen-Solal is perhaps strongest on one thread of Mark Rothko’s narrative: his experience as a Jewish immigrant.
Visual Arts Review: Duane Michals — Photography as Amazement
The photographer and the exhibition both make much of his outsider status and radical departure from the classic, reserved aesthetics of American art photography.
Visual Arts Review: “Turner & the Sea” at the Peabody Essex Museum — A Grand Performance
Some of J.M.W. Turner’s most personal, experimental, and enigmatic works have been selected for this show. They are also among the most fragile and least often shown.
Visual Arts Review: Ian Hamilton Finlay — Revolution Without a Manifesto
His art’s sunny, unhurried elegance, so at odds with its message, suggests that Finlay is taking a Swiftian rhetorical stance.
Visual Arts Review: “9 Artists” at MIT — Alienation, Resignation, and Despair Made Stimulating
After repeated visits (and you will need several to even scratch this dense content), 9 Artists begins to hang together in satisfying ways.
Visual Arts Review: “Raven’s Many Gifts” at PEM — When Cultures Collide
How much can a “native” artist adopt from Western modernism before his arts loses its tribal identity and, along with it, its appeal to an outside market?
Visual Arts Review: A Tribute to a Lost World of Joy and Fury — “Loisada: New York’s Lower East Side in the ’80s”
For once, in Ronald Reagan’s America, youthful talent and energy seemed able to trump everything else.
Visual Arts Review: A “Street Talk” That Stresses Harmony Rather Confrontation
Chris Daze Ellis takes a serious risk. If you hang your work next to Berenice Abbott’s, it had better be as brilliantly framed, as firmly direct, and as perfectly focused as hers.
Visual Arts Review: Jordan Eagles — Art Made of Blood in All Its Ruddy Glory
Rich as the material is, can any Blood Artist develop and mature by just seeing red?