Visual Arts
This exhibit is ideal for the budding designer to come and admire dresses with structured tulle, unique hems, bias cut silk, pounds of beads, sequins, and rhinestones, weaved organza and mink accents. Scaasi: American Couturier at the Loring Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA until June 19, 2011. By Megan Trombino It…
Read MoreLeonardo Drew has taken Louise Nevelson’s signature Cubist cabinets and turned them into something greater. By Franklin Einspruch. The career arc of Leonardo Drew began curling upwards over 20 years ago, and by the time his reputation had spread nationally in the early 1990s, identity politics had become an established feature of the art world.…
Read MoreThrough July 29th, the MFA in Boston is presenting “Alex Katz Prints.” Time to take a look at Arts Fuse Critic Franklin Einspruch’s thoughts on the artist, posted about an exhibition of Katz’s paintings at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine.
Read MoreIn his latest novel, Michael Cunningham writes about Manhattan’s art world with canny insight and sympathy. But he goes beyond that, anchoring his story not only in beauty, as it is constantly reconceived and imagined, but in considerations of love, sex, morality, and mortality. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages,…
Read MoreThis MFA exhibition displays some of the most intricate manifestations of tattoos in woodblock prints, leaving the viewer curious about its footprints in contemporary art and popular culture. By Yumi Araki Under the Skin: Tattoos in Japanese Prints is showing at the Museum of Fine Arts through January 2, 2011. As a cultural prelude to…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh Charles LeDray, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, MA, July 16 through October 17 New York sculptor Charles LeDray is known for making very, very tiny things—especially men’s clothing—with fanatical precision and craftsmanship. Something about them fascinates. A British critic has compared his elaborate, Liliputian arrangements to “the model tankers and cruise…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh It’s a hot weather tradition. Generations of American artists have followed the seasonal migration out of hot, sticky, eastern cities to Cape Cod (Edward Hopper, Hans Hoffman), the North Shore (Winslow Homer, Childe Hassan, Stuart Davis, Mark Rothko), and the Berkshires (Daniel Chester French, Norman Rockwell ). Besides their work, they left…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA through May 9. Locked into a low-status, unprofitable niche, talented Spanish still-life painter Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) made little money and achieved even less fame during his lifetime. He is said to have complained to the king, who never…
Read MoreI envision Rembrandt with chalk or pen always at hand, sketching from life and imagination constantly. This is also how he taught his pupils, who like him also produced numerous drawings related and unrelated to paintings or prints. Why do so many experts disagree? By Gary Schwartz In an earlier column I illustrated a large…
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