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Visual Arts Review: “Fashioned by Sargent” — Round One

November 6, 2023
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Is the artist’s direction of clothing choices — and how he painted the garments — a sufficiently compelling inquiry in which to anchor an exhibit?

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Visual Arts Review: Marks from Elsewhere — Cy Twombly and Léonie Guyer

February 28, 2023
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It’s no wonder poets have been drawn to write about Guyer and Twombly’s work. We are carried away by an art that is always immediate, hic et nunc, but elsewhere too.

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Visual Arts Review: “Life Magazine and the Power of Photography” — Some Fake Views?

October 24, 2022
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While impressive, Life Magazine and the Power of Photography disappoints.

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Visual Arts Commentary: Philip Guston and the Impossibility of Art Criticism

May 3, 2022
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While it’s too soon to call it timeless, the vitality in Philip Guston’s art has proved durable. But the structure around it – the “art world” in its blinkered, stultified form, institutional and academic in the worst senses of those words – has died and encased it.

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Visual Arts Review: “Fabrics of a Nation — American Quilt Stories”

October 12, 2021
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The quilts serve as landmarks whose significance is evolving with shifting times and demographics. Where have we come from, they ask. Where are we going? The answers are no longer what they were.

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Visual Arts Review: “Lucian Freud Self-Portraits” — Pictures of a Cool Narcissist

February 29, 2020
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I recommend this show for Lucian Freud’s highly polished craftsmanship, but his wry game of psychological hide-and-seek is not all that satisfying.

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Visual Arts Review: “Collecting Stories” — Yarns Worth Viewing

May 23, 2019
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Almost every painting here is a discovery worth making.

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Visual Arts Review: “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” — Casting a Coolly Warm Eye on Life and Death

February 11, 2019
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In Garciela Iturbide’s photographs, the living and the dying are often joined at the (exposed) skeletal hip.

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Film Review: “Nowhere to Hide” — A Potent Documentary about the Never-ending War in Iraq

December 6, 2017
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How palpable is the combat in Nowhere to Hide!

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Dance Film Preview: Mapping the Taps — Two Superb Documentaries

November 14, 2017
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The tap challenge, sometimes good natured, sometimes prickly, is at the heart of both of these remarkable documentaries.

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