Gentle GiantThe early Renaissance genius Fra Angelico painted even crucifixions with a glowing, ineffable warmth.
Wow! Neat-o!Elizabeth Murray embraced Pop Art’s playfulness without succumbing to chilly detachment.
Way Outside the BoxIn Santiago Calatrava, New York may have found an architectural savior. And lucky for us, he’s even moving to town.
Scribble ScribbleHow Van Gogh rendered his flickery world in the hard lines of pen and ink.
Is New York Too Safe?Our buildings are boring, our cultural institutions tentative, our sex lives constrained. Maybe a world-class city shouldn’t be quite so thoroug […]
Constructivist CriticismMasterpieces abound in the Guggenheim’s “Russia!”—but it
all seems too official.
Ink-Stained WretchesThe mad geniuses of “Obsessive Drawing” doodle around
the outside edges of outsider art.
Iron JoanOne could easily have written off Joan
Snyder as too earnest and cuddly.
But there’s steel under those warm fuzzies.
In Van Gogh’s Drawing RoomBy organizing an exhibition of his drawings instead of paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will give us a somewhat less familiar portrait […]
Floating OpusMore than 30 years after the artist’s death, a wonderful Robert Smithson folly bobs up at Manhattan’s edge.
Hooked on ClassicsThe Guggenheim’s Mapplethorpe
exhibit places the
artist in a Mannerist frame.
Waking the DeadThe Matisse and Cézanne shows prove
that smart curators can refresh
even the most overexposed artists.
The MaximalistThe Whitney brings a little of
Robert Smithson’s outward-looking art back into the white box.
Better Art Through ChemistryTwo ICP shows demonstrate
that the earliest photographers were artists as well as technicians.
Surrealism U.S.A.The enormous Lee Friedlander retrospective shows us
America in all its garish glee.
Collision Course With RealityNot quite a photorealist, not quite a photographer,
Malcolm Morley gives an ironic kick to
painting’s oldest function: documenting the familiar.
Jaded BeautyJack Goldstein and Gregory Crewdson
continue dancing on the line
between earnest and distanced.
The Interpretation of DreamsGritty and grounded,
Max Ernst managed to dig out the more substantive side of Surrealism.
Toxic CutenessAt the Japan Society’s
“Little Boy,” Hiroshima leads directly to Hello Kitty.
You’ll Laugh, You’ll Cry“Comic Grotesque” recalls an era
of German satire with
an outrageous, vicious bite.
Guts and GloryThe Guggenheim’s Aztec show revels in brutal theatricality; the Met’s China exhibit goes for the Buddhist steeliness of inner peace.
Bohemians at the GateAuthorities closed down a show at JFK’s grand, shuttered TWA terminal after the opening got out of hand. Too bad: The building alone is worth a […]
Stairway to NirvanaThe old Barneys building in Chelsea—with
spiral staircase intact—is reborn as a lovingly curated museum of Himalayan art.
Everything Is IlluminatedAtsuko Tanaka’s plugged-in dress has managed
to do what most other performance art can’t:
maintain its power for decades.
A Hundred George Ws
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Glass ActMoMA returns from Queens bigger and bolder.
Poster ChildrenA tour of the city during the Republican
National Convention suggests that contemporary political
art is in a sorry state.
Matter of Life and DeathIn the soot drawings and elaborate
organic-looking sculptures of Lee Bontecou,
glimpses of the eternal.
California DreamingHow Ed Ruscha’s drawings and photographs—
of signs, gas stations, parking lots—put viewers
in an L.A. state of mind.
Human NatureAt the Whitney, an artist who didn’t try to change the environment so much as become a part of it, almost fusing her body with the earth.
60 Flowers BloomAt the Asia Society and ICP, 60 photographers and video artists offer telling glimpses of a changing, post-Maoist China.
Tables d’HauteAt the Met, the beautiful—and unabashedly elitist—furniture of Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Art Deco’s greatest designer.
School’s OutFour shows around town offer fresh looks at some familiar painters. Who knew there was anything more to learn about Modigliani?
