Mario Naves

A portrait is an artist’s attempt to encapsulate and fix character, whether it’s been commissioned as an advertisement of power (all those pharaohs, kings, aristocrats and emperors) or something humble and intimate (think Rembrandt’s sobering self-depictions). But in the end, impetus counts less than insight. The Met’s marble bust of Caligula originally served as political propaganda, but what remains is cold, harsh truth.

Distinctions particular to portraiture came to mind when I was looking at Philip Burke’s portrait of Kurt Cobain, frontman for grunge rock band Nirvana and a suicide at the age of 27. It’s a jangled caricature made up of skewed lines, jabbing brush strokes and seemingly incompatible elisions of color.  read more »

The American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is best known for his mobiles—hanging sculptures fashioned from impeccably poised lengths of wire and thin metal plates, usually colored black and red. Taking direct inspiration from Miró, Calder distilled the Catalan master’s biomorphic vocabulary to the point at which Surrealist portent became happy caprice. The mobiles don’t need wind currents to set them into motion; they’re already lighter than air.

You’ll see Calder invent the mobile at roughly the midpoint of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years; 1926-1933,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a transformative moment prompted by a move to Paris.  read more »

Philippe de Montebello stepped up to the podium at the press preview for the exhibition “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions” and looked about ready to keel over. Explaining that he had caught a bug, Mr. de Montebello seemed adrift in a NyQuil haze, his voice croaky and his demeanor sluggish. The eve of a much anticipated tribute to an illustrious career—there are better times to catch a cold.

When Mr. de Montebello announced his retirement almost a year ago, many New Yorkers were taken aback. The museum’s public face and its unmistakable voice (who hasn’t heard those dulcet tones emanating from the nearest audio guide?), Mr.  read more »

The recent discovery of 130-some drawings by Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) has been likened to the unearthing of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The scrabbled fantasies of a schizophrenic and the roots of civilization—how could they not be equally important?

Hype knows no bounds, but the Ramírez find is a pretty big deal. Long known to aficionados of outsider art, his drawings were the subject of a retrospective last year at the American Folk Art Museum. Ramírez’s vertiginous tableaux of caballeros, animals and preternatural, zooming trains prompted far-reaching accolades. The Times claimed him as “one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.” Watch your back, Matisse.  read more »

How much of Paris Hilton’s crotch—you’ve seen it on the Internet, I’m sure—any rational person needs is a question asked by Auguries of Innocence, an exhibition of photographs by David LaChapelle at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Actually, Ms. Hilton only makes a fleeting appearance in what is, essentially, Mr. LaChapelle’s debut as a political commentator. War, he wants us to know, is a bad thing.

A protégé of Andy Warhol, Mr. LaChapelle gained renown as a celebrity photographer. His sleek and porno-wise pictures have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Interview, and have featured, among others, Naomi Campbell, Britney Spears and Jocelyne Wildenstein.  read more »

The first thing you’ve got to say about the Met’s new exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’s paintings, prints and drawings is this: It’s about time.

Over the past few years, a handful of almost surreptitious gallery exhibitions were devoted to the Italian modernist. The pickin’s were slim—10 paintings in each venue, if that—but they were enough to set gallery-goers drifting out in a haze of pleasurable disbelief. Why wasn’t this great—hell, sublime—painter getting the widespread attention he deserves?

The answer isn’t hard to pin down. Morandi painted tenderly choreographed arrays of bottles and boxes and the stray landscape—that’s about it. The pictures aren’t sexy.  read more »

The gallery season is in full swing and promises the usual mélange of novelties, big money, humdrum outrages, and stray oddments of aesthetic reward. Art types—students, collectors, curators, critics, Matthew Barney and Björk—will be navigating the streets of Chelsea, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, and—less so, one feels—57th Street and the Upper East Side. For those with a taste for its quiddities, the art season will, at the very least, entertain.

Brigid Berlin’s exhibition of needle-point pillows, at John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller (Oct. 21 to Nov. 22), is bound to be among the most entertaining. Daughter of Richard E. Berlin (chairman of the Hearst empire in its glory years) Brigid grew up among royalty and privilege.  read more »

Context plays an important role in art. This is particularly true of sculpture; it’s a medium that engages real space—that is to say, a place and our relationship to it.

Philip Grausman’s Susanna and Eileen (1996-1999), two monumental fiberglass sculptures, are on display on the grounds of the Katonah Museum of Art—Susanna on the grassy hill leading up to the entryway, and Eileen in the rear patio.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Mr. Grausman’s portrait-heads would look like at, say, MoMA. Both measure roughly 10 feet high and require a significant amount of viewing distance—they could, I think, command MoMA’s enormous contemporary galleries without strain, and maybe with finesse.  read more »

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), the subject of the MoMA exhibition “Kirchner and the Berlin Street,” is, in the greater scheme of 20th-century art, a minor painter, albeit one with a significant role in the shaping of German Modernism.

Kirchner was a founding member of “Die Brücke” (“the Bridge”), a collective of painters out to upset the establishment with art that was “strange to the normal person”—that is to say, Expressionism.

Kirchner had little formal training. He studied architecture as a sop to his parents, but abandoned it for art and the bohemian life. Along with other members of Die Brücke, including Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein, Kirchner advocated for an unpremeditated, rebellious and harsh aesthetic.  read more »

Felix Nussbaum’s Self in Concentration Camp (1940), a painting included in the exhibition “Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait With Horn” at the Neue Galerie, is as bleak as the title implies. Wearing a wool cap, a tattered jacket and a lean beard, the artist looks askance with steely distrust. In the background, a figure defecates into a large metal can. There’s barbed wire, a sky the color of steel wool and an air of Boschian portent.

Bosch’s hell couldn’t compare with Hitler’s. While studying in Rome, Nussbaum, a German Jew, heard Hitler’s minister of propaganda advocate for the Nazi ideal of art; Nussbaum realized soon enough that neither he nor his paintings fit the standard.  read more »

In the catalog accompanying “The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar,” an exhibition of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the artist holds forth on various aspects of his work—among them, his African heritage, the role of mimicry in art, being a twin, and themes of gender and postcolonialism. He lists as his peers Allen Ginsberg, Britney Spears, Fragonard, Versace and Kara Walker. He’s not crazy about Spike Lee or Titian, and is suspicious of Barack Obama—“his rabbit holes,” Wiley says, “are capable of losing structural integrity by virtue of their own weight.”

Which is to say: Let’s be be thankful that Mr.  read more »

In Edward Albee’s The Occupant, a play about the American sculptor Louise Nevelson, a nameless interviewer quizzes the artist on her fame and critical fortunes. He mentions the name “Louise Bourgeois.” Nevelson reacts with dismissive hauteur. The implication is clear: The Nevelson character feels threatened by Ms. Bourgeois.

Why, exactly, is left unanswered. Envy over critical status or contemporary relevance might play into it. Maybe it has something to do with image—the “grande dame” thing—or with competition, Ms. Nevelson being one of the few dames to gain a measure of renown. Given that Mr. Albee knew the Nevelson character’s real-life counterpart, it’s fair, I think, to assume that the Bourgeois snub has some basis in fact, and it set me to thinking about their artistic commonalities.  read more »

How will art history judge Burgess Collins (1923-2004), the artist better known as Jess? The new exhibition of his work at Tibor de Nagy Gallery won’t tell you, but there’s one thing for sure about Jess’ current standing: He’s nowhere—but, then again, that might stand as the most fitting tribute to an artist defined by his eccentricity.

You can cast about for influences. Jess’ collages—or, as he dubbed them, “paste-ups”—recall the dreamlike incongruities of Surrealism and a little of Dadaism’s choppy aggression. His fondness for mass media and his paintings based on found commercial illustrations (called the Translations) have led critics to compare his work to pop art.  read more »

In his invaluable book Temperaments: Artists Facing Their Work, art writer Dan Hofstadter profiled the painter Richard Diebenkorn. It’s a remarkable essay, not least because its subject is unexciting.

Diebenkorn comes across as a solid family man and a collegial instructor. He enjoyed the occasional drink, didn’t sleep around or throw punches. His lifestyle was bourgeois and his manner reserved. He went to the studio and painted pictures. Hollywood will leave him alone.

But Diebenkorn is a great painter all the same. Imagine that: A significant artist who wasn’t an inarticulate, womanizing and abusive genius who drank too much and who alienated family, friends, patrons and dealers.  read more »

A young artist recently told me that working from observation was an antiquated endeavor. Why look at a still-life arrangement when taking a photograph of it would do just as nicely? We have, after all, reached a stage in human development when learning from stuff out there is moot. Getting your hands dirty—what’s the point? High tech has made low tech irrelevant, over and out.

The sculptor Jilaine Jones, whose work is at the New York Studio School, knows otherwise. Mass and volume, proportion and space, line as definition, and the ineluctability of gravity—these are universals best experienced firsthand. Without direct contact, art becomes a tinny imitation of itself—there are 40,000 years or so of world art to prove the point.  read more »

David Byrne has always been pretentious; that’s part of his charm. From the Talking Heads’ first single in 1977, “Love—Building on Fire,” to his debut as screenwriter and director with True Stories, and to myriad other projects—including, of all things, an opera about Imelda Marcos—Mr. Byrne has proved that faux naïveté, arty self-consciousness and adroitly deployed nerdiness can be diverting and sometimes irresistible.

Notwithstanding a clinical fascination with the common folk, Mr. Byrne is a creature inconceivable outside Manhattan’s artier districts. Closer in aesthetic to the neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg than to the touched-by-God folk painter Howard Finster (both of whom provided Talking Heads CD cover illustrations), Mr.  read more »

Whatever else you can say about it, the Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s work, on view at PaceWildenstein’s 22nd and 25th street locations, is perfect tourist fare. Think about it: Chelsea is the hub of the international scene. Its notoriety and commercial clout have extended beyond in-the-know aficionados. Chelsea isn’t the Met, but it is attracting out-of-towners, with kids in tow, eager for the buzz of outrageousness.  read more »

Iran’s worrisome prominence in world events can’t help but cross your mind while viewing “Ardeshir Mohassess; Art and Satire in Iran,” an exhibition on view at the Asia Society. And not only because Mr. Mohassess hails from Iran. His brand of satire is, to put it mildly, skeptical of his home country’s political convolutions. Would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffer Mr. Mohassess’ uncompromising art gladly?  read more »

Catherine Murphy’s drawings are amazing. As feats of versimilitude, they are without peer in contemporary art—it’s difficult to bring to mind another artist capable of putting pencil to paper with as much concentration and dexterity. Ms. Murphy is unsparing in her dedication to observed fact.

Spill (2007), on display at Knoedler and Company along with a handful of other drawings and seven oil paintings, is a tour de force likely to have viewers gaping in disbelief.  read more »

A painter, with tousled hair and a distant gaze, lies upon a rocky ground. He’s dressed in vaguely 19th-century garb and holds a long brush daubed with yellow. A slack noose placed around his neck is tied to an easel. The canvas on it is bright white.

In the background, a ladder leans upright with no discernible support. A gallows is partially draped with black cloth. Further back a cow runs off a cliff. The sky is dusty gray. Blanketing all of it is the musty patina of academic painting come and gone.  read more »

Drive—aesthetic drive—is rare in contemporary art. Commerce is the thing. And John Dubrow, whose paintings are at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, wants to sell his art as much as the next guy. But viewers will recognize that commerce is the last thing on Mr. Dubrow’s mind when he’s in the studio. His paintings are relentlessly independent, his drive is never in question and, boy, is it intimidating.

Initiative counts for bubkes if the results are lousy; drive can’t be the sole determinant of merit. Mr.  read more »

Once, the American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980) was a polarizing artist. It’s the stuff of legend: An esteemed second-generation Abstract Expressionist, renowned for exquisitely honed arrangements of fleshy brushstrokes, turns to a brutish figurative art—a nightmarish realm of Klansmen, endless hangovers and hellish rooms lit by bare light bulbs.  read more »

A few months back, I bumped into a colleague at the Met’s Courbet exhibition. After a polite disagreement about the merits of the 19th-century French painter—he’s a fan, I’m not—we extolled the Met’s stellar run of historical exhibitions mounted under the guidance of since-retired director Philippe de Montebello: Ingres, tapestries, Velázquez, the Greek and Roman galleries, the list goes on.

When the discussion turned to the museum’s forays into contemporary art, the requisite eyeball-rolling ensued.  read more »

In the past 30 years Thomas Nozkowski’s allusive yet enigmatically abstract paintings have gradually acquired a cultlike devotion. This patient, quietly determined artist is the anti-hype—his paintings are slow.

Lately, however, Mr. Nozkowski has been getting a lot of attention. His paintings were featured at the Venice Biennale last summer; a mini-retrospective at Long Island City’s Emily Fisher Landau Center just closed; and two of his paintings from MoMA’s permanent collection are currently on display.  read more »

The most interesting thing about Takashi Murakami, whose paintings, sculptures and merchandise are the subject of “© Murakami” at the Brooklyn Museum, is that he’s above shame. To know shame is to realize there are standards of behavior that, when bent or broken, cause remorse or, at least, self-awareness of having done wrong. Shame is unknown in Mr. Murakami’s rarefied orbit: Art is an adjunct of capital. There’s no second thought given to this fact.

Andy Warhol is the starting point for Mr. Murakami’s cold embrace of heedless commercialism.  read more »

Susan Homer, whose paintings are at metaphor contemporary art in Brooklyn, works in two distinct manners predicated on two distinct scales. On large canvases—for Ms. Homer that would be around five by six feet—she paints free-floating accumulations of flora. In small formats—the paintings don’t go beyond 12 inches in any direction—Ms. Homer dedicates herself to domesticity graced by nature: birds alighting on teacups, cupcakes or a dish containing ginger cookies.

Ms.  read more »

Squirreled away in the Whitney’s mezzanine galleries, far from the Biennial’s hubbub, is an exhibition of paintings, drawings and watercolors by the American modernist Charles Demuth (1883-1935). “Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster” is devoted predominantly to industrial images of Demuth’s Pennsylvania hometown.  read more »

“Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860,” an exhibition at the Asia Society, is a trying experience because the awe it elicits is unremitting. Has there been a New York exhibition quite as beautiful?  read more »

The 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a big personality, a cultural subversive, a braggart and showman worthy of P. T. Barnum. He was also a paint-handler of exquisite grit and outrageous sensuality—traits that combined into an artist whose greatness just barely redeemed his insufferable narcissism. By the time you’re through with the first gallery of the Met’s “Gustave Courbet,” ringed with 20 or so self-portraits of the artist, you’ll have had quite enough of Courbet.

The arrogance of youth is everywhere in these pictures.  read more »

Somewhere there’s an art history graduate student sitting in Starbucks, laptop and venti decaf latte on hand, writing a thesis on the Whitney Biennial. It’s bound to be a history of arrant egos, frustrated reputations, political intrigue, curatorial missteps and temporary fame.

Part of the narrative will be an inventory of reviews. Given the negative and sometimes vitriolic criticism the Biennial has engendered over the years, it should be an entertaining and maybe hilarious roundup.  read more »

“Reason in the grass and tears in the sky”—this lyrical sentiment was Paul Cézanne’s self-stated ambition for his art and referred directly to the paintings of the French classicist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), whose landscapes are the subject of “Poussin and Nature; Arcadian Visions,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Viewers coming into contact with a Poussin painting, let alone 40 or so, will realize how high the bar is that Cézanne set for himself. While no painting is perfect, Poussin came close, and not a few times.  read more »

Parisian-born sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ life and career have been remarkable. Born in 1911, four years after Picasso painted Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, Bourgeois came of age during a time when “avant-garde” had yet to become the empty boast of PR men. Influenced by the murkier tangents of Surrealism, Ms. Bourgeois, who studied at the École du Louvre and was Fernand Léger’s assistant before coming to the United States in 1938, pursues a fetishistic form of sculpture that touches upon childhood fantasy and bodily decrepitude. A couple of Ms.  read more »

“Parmigianino’s Antea: A Beautiful Artifice,” an exhibition at the Frick Collection, poses an interesting question: Is it more challenging to view a show dedicated to a single work of art, or one featuring several?

A comprehensive exhibition demands concentration predicated, in part, on sheer numbers. The viewer enjoys (or contends with) breadth and context. But an exhibition featuring a single work demands a different kind of attention.  read more »

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine, appeared on a panel a few years back where he described the painter Rackstraw Downes as “strong conservative.” We know what “strong” is: forceful, confident and of a high quality. But “conservative”—what on earth can that mean?

Mr. Downes is a representational painter—this is to say, an artist who creates recognizable images. But so are Will Cotton, Neo Rauch and Carroll Dunham. No one runs around pegging them as “conservative,” so that can’t be it.  read more »

Jasper Johns seems like a down-to-earth kind of guy. In an interview conducted by curator Nan Rosenthal, published in the catalog accompanying “Jasper Johns: Gray,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Johns answers questions with Hemingway-like curtness. It’s a self-effacing performance. You didn’t have to be there to register his droll, deadpan demeanor.

Ms. Rosenthal quizzes the artist on his gray paintings and often comes away with … not much. Mr. Johns isn’t belligerent or evasive.  read more »

Any event prompting a reacquaintance with The Lives of the Artists, the seminal art historical tract by Giorgio Vasari, is, almost by definition, a good one. So it is with “Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries; Drawings From the Uffizi,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Vasari (1511-1574) was a vastly important figure in 16th-century Florence; the city and era are inconceivable without him.  read more »

“Diebenkorn in New Mexico” is, as its title makes plain, an exhibition about place as much as it is about art. The degree to which geographic specificity determines the character of a work may be a moot point—for some, the globe-crossing verities of our technological age have all but trumped the local. The smoky and sometimes rambunctious paintings on display at N.Y.U.’s Grey Art Gallery are, in that light, antiquated.  read more »

The Dadaist painter Francis Picabia (1879-1953) went through life with no shortage of self-generated noms de plume. To name a few: funny guy, imbecile, pickpocket, failure, cannibal, silly willy and “the only complete artist.” He signed off as “Napoleon,” “Saint Augustine” and “The Blessed Virgin.” Anyone familiar with Dada will recognize its nose-thumbing esprit in Picabia’s absurdist designations.

Picabia considered himself the first Dadaist.  read more »

Generosity of spirit and joyous excess are the hallmarks of Roy De Forest’s blissfully excessive art, the subject of a memorial exhibition at George Adams Gallery. (De Forest died last spring at the age of 77.) His paintings, drawings and sculptures were often classified as “California Funk,” a description foisted upon a group of West Coast artists who treated tradition with cheery disregard. No highfalutin intentions, please, we’re Californians.  read more »

A Fete at Saint-Cloud (ca. 1760), a drawing on display at the Frick Collection’s exhibition of the works of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780), depicts an 18th-century Parisian bal champêtre, or outdoor ball. Set in the grandiose Parc de Saint-Cloud with the magisterial staircase of the Grande Cascade as its backdrop, the young men and women of fashionable society display their good breeding.  read more »

“If it wasn’t magic, it was merchandise”—that was the artistic credo of the American sculptor Christopher Wilmarth (1943-1987), whose work is on display at Betty Cuningham Gallery. The implication is that aesthetic experience is beyond the reach of money. In this era of overpriced art and proud opportunism, Wilmarth’s sentiment can seem naïve. Artists have catered to authority from time immemorial. What’s important is how fully a work of art sustains itself as an independent entity.  read more »

The Museum of Modern Art posits that Lucian Freud’s etchings are as integral to his art as the paintings, but its exhibition title, “The Painter’s Etchings,” intimates that Freud’s real priority is working on canvas.

We’re encouraged to compare and contrast the 21 paintings on display with around 100 prints. How is Freud’s vision altered or confirmed by his approach to the two media?  read more »

Art Basel Miami Beach—the self-proclaimed “most important art show in the United States”—started off not with a bang, but a thrash: Iggy and the Stooges played a free concert called Art Loves Music. There’s a certain pleasure to be had in imagining a mosh pit of well-heeled collectors subjecting themselves to Iggy’s shirtless ministrations. What better way to celebrate doling out a fortune on a work of art?  read more »

No more black lights for Bridget Riley—the Op Art pioneer gets historical.  read more »

And they won’t leave until art historians start taking them seriously.  read more »

The Met reconsiders the rituals that gave traditional African art its meaning.  read more »

Rosemarie Beck’s struggle against the influence of the mighty Abstract Expressionists was brave, but futile.  read more »

A ‘backyard’ sculptor brings deadpan humor and whimsy to MoMA’s second floor.  read more »

The Pointillist found a ghostly romance when he put his palette aside.  read more »

H.C. Westermann’s defiantly plainspoken art still confounds the critics.  read more »