What tangible or visible traces remain, apart from the surviving artworks sitting in museums or private collections, of the hundreds of thousands of artists who have resided in New York over the last century? As far as I can see, not very much. In most of the neighborhoods they once frequented, from SoHo to Williamsburg, studios have been converted into luxury residential units, or entire buildings that used to house artists have been torn down to make way for yet more condo towers. Soon, it seems, the only evidence of the city’s artistic past will be the foundations set up to preserve the legacy of a few individual artists. Read More>>

The Ghosts of Art Criticism

Art in America, October, 2019

“Who are your favorite art critics? What art magazines do you like to read?” As a visiting critic at MFA programs around the country, I have often posed these two questions to students. Until recently most of them had a preferred art critic (usually Dave Hickey, Peter Schjeldahl, or Jerry Saltz, with an occasional theorist like bell hooks or Nicolas Bourriaud tossed into the mix). There seemed to be less attention paid to art magazines, though, when pressed, class members would admit to being aware of at least two or three. Over the last few years, however, I have noticed that fewer and fewer students are willing (or able) to offer the names of favorite critics, and that art magazines largely seem to have dropped out of their routines. Accordingly, I have adjusted my approach. Now I ask only one question: “Do you read any art criticism?” Read More>>

Stranger Tools

Art in America, March 2018

LAST FALL I VISITED the studio of Houston painter Paul Kremer. Although it had been two or three years since I stopped by to see what he was up to, the delay wasn’t from any lack of interest. On the contrary,’I’ve become increasingly impressed by Kremer’s large-scale work: bold compositions whose hard-edge, single-color shapes (generally red-orange, black, or white) oscillate between flat abstraction and illusionistic geometry, evoking monumental architecture as well as broken-off glacier sections. Kremer’s uninflected surfaces and smooth contours mark him as an heir of Ellsworth Kelly, while his historicism (he is well aware that his paintings recall not only Kelly but a large swath of 1960s art and design) and his visual humor (using spatial illusion to gently mock formalist austerity) bear the imprint of postmodernism. Kremer’s subversive wit, along with his passion for art history, is even more evident in Great Art in Ugly Rooms, his widely viewed Tumblr blog featuring famous paintings digitally inserted into unlikely interiors. Read More>>

Poems Without Words (David Reed)

Art in America, March, 2017

David Reed exhibited a group of work in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York. A traveling show reunites these Brushstroke paintings for new audiences.

A Parable
At the age of twenty-nine a New York artist has his first solo show. Hanging in the clean white space are nineteen of his recent paintings: gestural abstractions striking for their stacks of bold, modular brushstrokes (mostly black on white grounds) and unusual formats (many of the canvases are exceedingly narrow and tall). Despite being critically well received—one reviewer proclaims the work to be “a new kind of painting, one that recasts the vocabulary of abstraction in a form giving rise to new precisions of feeling”—the show doesn’t do particularly well with collectors: only one painting sells. Read More>>

Surreal Cairo

Art in America, January 2017

A traveling exhibition brings the Surrealist paintings and drawings of Art et Liberté, an avant-garde Egyptian art group active during the Second World War, to audiences outside of their country.

Set in the years before and after the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk, Beer in the Snooker Club, written in English and published in 1964, brilliantly portrays privileged Cairo youth reeling from or trying to blithely ignore the social and political chaos around them. Although poor in relation to their spoiled rich friends, Ram and Font have been educated at a posh English-style school and spent four years living in London. Hence their passion for Draught Bass Ale, a libation apparently unavailable in Egypt in the 1950s. The two young men are keenly aware of their dilemma as Westernized Egyptians who nonetheless despise colonialism and its legacy of racism and underdevelopment. “The real trouble with us,” Font observes, as they drink their doctored ales, “is that we’re so English it is nauseating. We have no culture of our own.” Read More>>

Varieties of Reclamation (Rosalyn Drexler)

Art in America, September, 2016

A survey of Rosalyn Drexler’s six-decade career highlights paintings that meld hard-boiled Pop imagery and bold abstraction.

OF THE MANY surprises that awaited visitors to this summer’s Rosalyn Drexler survey at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, was a selection of three-dimensional work. Unlikely as it seems, this artist, known for many decades as a Pop painter whose canvases throng with violent, sensual imagery amid bright fields of color, began her career working exclusively as a sculptor. Dating from 1958 to 1961, the sculptures on view were not the result of some ancillary detour branching off from painting but in fact represent an entire, autonomous body of work. Not only that, they offer insight into the beginning of Drexler’s artistic life. Read More>>

Trust Lust (William N. Copley)

Art in America, June, 2016

An art world impresario who championed Surrealism, William N. Copley was also an idiosyncratic painter of subjects ranging from the utterly banal to the provocatively sexual.

It’s tempting to portray William N. Copley (1919–1996) as a once marginalized figure whose work is only now, twenty years after his death, receiving adequate recognition thanks to the way his art resonates with current concerns. There is certainly some truth to this scenario. During much of Copley’s career, his subject matter and style—concentrated on garish, rollicking erotica painted in a faux-naïf, comics-influenced mode—set him apart from most streams of American art of the time. His non-negotiable devotion to figuration alienated him from every successive phase of abstraction flowing around him… Read More>>

The Hole Truth

Art in America, October 29, 2014

At times it seems that everything ever written about the 1970s is concerned with demonstrating just how different that decade was from the one that preceded it. At the risk of prolonging this historical cliché, I’d like to note that a lot of 1960s art in the United States, from Color Field painting to Pop art to Minimalism, favored smooth, clean surfaces, while the art of the 1970s fell in love with rough textures, especially in the medium of painting. As the decade progressed, surfaces seemed to get grittier and more irregular in the work of artists such as Larry Poons, Harmony Hammond and Ralph Humphrey, an irruption that might be said to culminate with Julian Schnabel’s first plate painting, The Patients and the Doctors (1978). Of all the artists experimenting with unevenly textured surfaces, perhaps no one did so with such nuance and intensity as Howardena Pindell. Read More>>

Provisional Painting 2: To rest lightly on earth

Art in America, February 2012

1. PAINTING IS IMPOSSIBLE
At the opening of his compact memoir A Giacometti Portrait (1965), James Lord is on a 1964 visit to Paris. He agrees to pose for Giacometti, who has proposed a “sketch” on canvas of his young American friend which is expected to require only a single sitting. They set to work in Giacometti’s dilapidated studio, situated in an alleyway in the 14th arrondissement. Things start well, but at the end of the sitting, Giacometti announces his deep dissatisfaction with the results and obliterates most of the image. He asks Lord to pose again the next day, when the process repeats itself. As more days, then weeks, go by, the artist increasingly despairs of his task, canceling out each day’s efforts as Lord remains a virtual prisoner in Paris, waiting for his portrait to be finished, changing his travel reservations again and again. Finally, late one afternoon, on the 18th sitting, as the last light is going, he is able to dissuade Giacometti from painting out that day’s work, and the portrait is . . . “finished” isn’t the right word. Let’s say abandoned. Read More>>

The Big Picture: Reconsidering Julian Schnabel

Art in America, February 2011

Provisional Painting

Art in America, May 1, 2009

For the past year or so I’ve become increasingly aware of a kind of provisionality within the practice of painting. I first noticed it pervading the canvases of Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Mary Heilmann and Michael Krebber, artists who have long made works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling. In different ways, they all deliberately turn away from “strong” painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse. Read More>>

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Punk: Pettibon

Art in America, February 2009

The annals of contemporary art are full of improbable trajectories, tales of women and men developing into widely celebrated artists from the most unlikely beginnings. Think, for instance, of Pinot-Gallizio, the middle-aged Italian pharmacist who assisted at the birth of Situationism and invented a radical painting practice in the provincial town of Alba in the 1950s, or Marcel Broodthaers, a Belgian poet who one day decided to create something “insincere” and thus launched what would ultimately be a hugely influential art career and a new genre of art-making (institutional critique). The path taken by Raymond Pettibon, one of the most admired artists of the last decade, is also out of the ordinary, especially when compared to the current MFA-program-to-gallery-to-museum conveyor belt that nearly every successful young artist must ride. Read More>>

A Quiet Crisis

Art in America, March 2003

Painting and the Past
Forgetting the past, or keeping it safely quarantined or never having known it in the first place—much of what’s wrong with contemporary painting is, I think, the result of people and institutions adopting those attitudes. “Wait a moment,” some readers may cry, “isn’t there a lot of historically informed painting being made today? Aren’t artists doing all kinds of cultural archeology?” Read More>>