Recent Editorials

Arts+

Renoir, Full-On at the Frick

"Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting"

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
February 8, 2012

An exhibition opened yesterday at The Frick Collection that studies Pierre-Auguste Renoir's uses of the full-length portrait format - all nine of them. "This is the first comprehensive study of the artist's engagement with the full-length format,"…

Johann Zoffany RA: Society Observed

The Yale Center for British Art Re-Examines a British Master

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
February 3, 2012

The Yale Center for British Art has set out to rehabilitate the reputation of Johann Zoffany, a German expatriate who became a member of the Royal Academy by appointment of King George III. One might argue that he isn’t better-known for fair reasons…

Immersion in Painting

Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
January 31, 2012

Bill Scott’s paintings have an atmosphere of ease, but consideration and reconsideration of beautiful form churn within them. Two or Three Nudes in a Landscape (2010) summarizes Scott’s endeavor, its delightful title alluding to an image that somehow…

The Enchanted Landscape

Claude Lorrain in Frankfurt

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
January 27, 2012

Start making your travel arrangements. One week from today will see the opening of a monographic exhibition of Claude Lorrain at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. “'Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape' presents about one hundred and thirty works…

Fifty Vellums

Tad Wiley at George Lawson Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
January 25, 2012

"The vellum support has been a perfect choice," explains Tad Wiley regarding his current exhibition, "in that its smooth surface allows the paint to sit right up on top. However the surface is not without 'tooth', which traps the more thinned out…

Tactility as Mysticism

Robert Sagerman at Margaret Thatcher Projects

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
January 13, 2012

According to Margaret Thatcher Projects, “From the beginning of his attraction to abstract painting, an interest in its sensed metaphysical content guided and influenced Robert Sagerman,” who holds a PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York…

Joan Mitchell Becomes the Sunflower

By Last Chance to see "Last Paintings"
January 4, 2012

"Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings" closes today at Cheim and Read. The exhibition focuses on paintings she made from 1985 until her death in 1992. "Though Mitchell abstracted nature, gleaning only its essence, her advocacy for the natural world as a…

The Indefatigable Abstractionist

Pat Passlof at Elizabeth Harris

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
December 20, 2011

A serious segment of the art world looked forward to the exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery of paintings by Pat Passlof that opened November 19. The New York Times had just profiled her in October, detailing her efforts to maintain herself and her…

An Old Expressionist

George McNeil at Ameringer McEnery Yohe

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
December 13, 2011

"George McNeil (1908-1995) had a career that spanned the entire postwar American art era," according to Ameringer McEnery Yohe, which is exhibiting a selection of the artist's work dating from 1957 to 1969. "McNeil attended Pratt Institute and the Art…

An Art of Balance

"Matisse and the Model" Ends Tomorrow at Eykyn Maclean

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
December 9, 2011

Today and tomorrow will be your last chances to see "Matisse and the Model" at Eykyn Maclean. "As Matisse noted in 1939," says the gallery, "he relied on his models to help him find expression for his shifting creative vision, and he looked upon them…

Liquid on Stone

Wendy Artin's Parthenon Friezes

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
November 16, 2011

Wendy Artin's life-size watercolor interpretations of the Elgin Marbles are such extraordinary technical feats that my initial reaction to them, as a lesser practitioner of the medium, was gut-sinking envy. Typically, for this degree of realism, one…

A Lemon and an Orange Side by Side

Georges Braque at Acquavella Galleries

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
November 4, 2011

"Best known as the co-founder of Cubism with Pablo Picasso and as the inventor of the papier collé technique, Georges Braque’s legacy is better understood in the context of his lasting influence on artists for the past century," says William…

Fête Champêtre

Audrey Ushenko Throws a Party at Denise Bibro Fine Art

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
October 13, 2011

This evening there will be an opening reception at Denise Bibro Fine Art for an exhibition of new works by Audrey Ushenko, a widely exhibited member of the National Academy of Art in New York City. "As the title suggests, Ushenko’s uniquely rendered…

A Heart's Hot Shell

Aaron Holz at RARE Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
October 4, 2011

RARE Gallery is displaying the transluscent, evocative paintings of Aaron Holz through Thursday of this week in an exhibition entitled "A Heart's Hot Shell." According to the gallery, "The title of the exhibition is taken from Chapter 41 of Herman…

Paths of the Sun

Graham Nickson at Knoedler & Company

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
September 22, 2011

The current exhibition of Graham Nickson at Knoedler & Company brings together three bodies of the artist's work, according to the gallery. "The first, a group of early oils composed with frames hand-painted by the artist, most created in the environs…

An Art Fair for the Artists

Vaulting the Gatekeepers on Governors Island

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
September 17, 2011

The colossal success of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2002 caused a proliferation of art fairs over the years, and together they have permanently altered the way art is bought and sold. Many of these fairs struggle not to become duplicates of one another…

Lights in the Expanse of the Heavens

Maja Lisa Engelhardt at Elizabeth Harris Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
September 13, 2011

Danish artist Maja Lisa Engelhardt is showing her interpretive landscapes, all entitled The Fourth Day, in an exhibition that opened last Thursday at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. "In view of my painterly way of expressing myself, The Fourth Day is a rare…

A Decade-Long Day

Honoring Wounded Soldiers in a Bushwick Exhibition

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
September 8, 2011

"9/11 did not end on 9/11. For American soldiers, 9/11 has been a decade-long day," says James Panero, noted art critic, Managing Editor of The New Criterion, and curator of "The Joe Bonham Project," currently on display at Storefront. "As of this…

Interesting for No Good Reason

Lois Dodd in Maine

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
September 2, 2011

The name of Lois Dodd has come up a few times in recent conversations with artists I respect. I finally got to see some of her work in person at a solo exhibition at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine. I was expecting the sort of painter’s-painter…

Paintings That Shouldn’t Work

Elisabeth Condon at Lesley Heller Workspace

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
August 4, 2011

Imagine if you could speak several languages, switching from one to another to suit your thoughts, inside of a single sentence. You might begin in English for the sake of clarity, then change to Chinese for an apt metaphor, then over to French for…

Jane Fine in MELT at the Tang

By ERIC GELBER, Special to the Sun
July 27, 2011

Jane Fine’s Battlefield IV, (2004) is one of several striking works currently on view in MELT, at Skidmore’s Tang Art Museum, in Saratoga Springs, New York (Bernard Cohen, Salvador Dali, Mary Frank, Rico Lebrun, Charles Long, Alexander Ross, Dieter…

Krazy as Muse

Walter Darby Bannard and the Comics of George Herriman

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
July 19, 2011

Conventional wisdom about Abstract Expressionism holds that it is concerned with pure essence of painting, excluding all content, referring only to its heroic self. As a practitioner, it’s a different story. One doesn’t worry about purity. One casts…

An Easel Among The Flesh Pots

Joan Marie Kelly depicts the real lives of women on the streets and brothels of Asia's cities

By DAVID COHEN.
July 14, 2011

Joan Marie Kelly, an American painter who lives and teaches in Singapore, opens a show of paintings Thursday night at New York’s Blue Mountain Gallery that defy expectations. She works strictly from the motif in a realist idiom, but she is drawn to…

Separating the Goats from the Sheep

Sculptural Installation in Fort Greene Park Inaugurates New Commissioning Prize for Emerging Artists

By David Cohen
June 24, 2011

Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park has a group of new sculptures at its north-east entrance plaza. The two goats and a deer, works by young Scottish artist Ruth McKerrell (born 1983), inaugurate a significant annual prize for New York, the Clare Weiss…

Driven to Abstraction

Contemporary Abstract Painting at Von Lintel

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
June 9, 2011

A reception opens at 6 PM this evening at Von Lintel Gallery for "a group show of eight contemporary abstract artists who represent a diverse range of entry points into abstraction," according to the gallery. The artists included are Andrea Belag…

Late Spring

Leon Kossoff at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
June 6, 2011

Leon Kossoff’s paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash show the octogenarian British painter continuing to work in portraiture and landscape, with a brush loaded with oils as if they were tar, favoring a palette based on a sooty, British gray. In that…

Caro's Authority

Anthony Caro on the Roof of the Met

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
June 3, 2011

A couple of weeks ago your author noted that appreciation of the painter Jules Olitski has largely been conducted as a proxy war against the critic Clement Greenberg. You may have witnessed related hostilities in late April, when Ken Johnson wrote…

Color and Consequence

Wolf Kahn at Ameringer McEnery Yohe

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
June 1, 2011

Wolf Kahn, the celebrated landscape painter, has an exhibition of new work opening tomorrow evening at Ameringer McEnery Yohe. "The new paintings gathered in this exhibition continue to address elemental questions of space, shape and color with rigor…

Compelled by Pictorial Truth

David Hornung at John Davis Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 27, 2011

Yesterday, four solo exhibitions began at John Davis Gallery in Hudson. Notable among them is a display of new work by David Hornung, who writes, "These recent pictures, all made with gouache on handmade paper, were completed in the winter and spring…

Maine as Muse

Art Inspired by Maine at Lohin Geduld Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 25, 2011

"The craggy coastline and pristine woodlands of Maine have drawn artists to the northeast corner of the country for centuries," says Lohin Geduld gallery, whose exhibition, "Maine as Muse," starts today and opens tomorrow evening, 5-7 PM. "A rich…

A Few Gestures Are All That Is Needed

Virva Hinnemo and George Negroponte at Kouros Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 23, 2011

"Two artists in the same house make for a lot of regression," writes George Negroponte, whose solo exhibition upstairs at Kouros Gallery accompanies that of his wife, Virva Hinnemo, downstairs. "To some it may look predictably poetic, like two fried…

Leah Durner's Naked Color

Artist to Speak with Noted Critic David Cohen

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 20, 2011

Tomorrow, 571 Projects will host a conversation between critic David Cohen and artist Leah Durner, whose abstract paintings are the subject of "Naked Color" at the gallery. Cohen, who produces Artcritical, has written of Durner, "[she] is an action…

Abstraction and the City, New York and Beyond

Two Exhibitions of Conrad Marca-Relli

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 18, 2011

Simultaneous exhibitions of Conrad Marca-Relli are taking place at the moment at Knoedler & Company and the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton. The Boston-born artist, who died in 2000 in Parma, Italy, is associated with both New…

Embracing Jules Olitski

Pivotal Paintings Appear at Ann Freedman's New Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 13, 2011

The inaugural exhibition of FreemdanArt begins today with a series of large-scale paintings by Jules Olitski that until recently have been kept out of view. In 2009, Ann Freedman, then still president and director at Knoedler Gallery, approached the…

Iva Gueorguieva's Kinetic Landscape

"A Stitch In Graft" at Ameringer McEnery Yohe

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 11, 2011

“Paintings can unfold endlessly, both spatially and temporally, without constraints," says Iva Gueorguieva, whose works are currently on display at Ameringer McEnery Yohe. "They don’t have to stop or ever resolve." According to the gallery…

Perception of Ecstacy

Norman Bluhm at Loretta Howard Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 9, 2011

"There is a supple gracefulness to Bluhm’s paintings that feels as choreographed and inevitable as Fred Astaire’s defiance of gravity," writes John Yau in the catalog for the exhibition of Norman Bluhm at Loretta Howard Gallery. "His hybrid forms…

Mad Love for Marie-Thérèse

Picasso's Muse at Gagosian Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 4, 2011

"In 1927, on a street in Paris, Picasso encountered the unassuming girl, just shy of eighteen years old, who would become his lover and one of modern art’s most famous muses," according to Gagosian Gallery, which has mounted an exhibition that focuses…

Paint as Flesh

Exhibition Pairs Soutine and Bacon

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
May 2, 2011

An exhibition starting today at Helly Nahmad Gallery shows Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon alongside one another, demonstrating the influence that the former had on the latter. "There are distinct links between the two painters: direct painting and…

Out of the Reach of Premeditation

Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 25, 2011

Jane Freilicher commands unalloyed reverence from fellow painters. I learned from a gallery director at Tibor de Nagy, for instance, that Thomas Nozkowski, whose work featured in their recently concluded “Object/Image” show, expressed elation at being…

Sam Borenstein and the Colors of Montreal

Vibrant Paintings at the Yeshiva University Museum

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 22, 2011

“While Sam Borenstein is well-known in Montreal and across Canada, his artwork may come as a great revelation to many New Yorkers,” says Dr. Jacob Wisse, director of the Yeshiva University Museum. “In addition to its aesthetic merit, the exhibition…

A Visionary of the Near-at-Hand

Matthew Daub at ACA Galleries

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 19, 2011

While many contemporary artists consider the urban landscape, few are doing so with the craftsmanship and nuanced emotion of Matthew Daub. Joyce Carol Oates, in an introduction to the catalog of his current exhibition at ACA Galleries, writes, "His…

Meridians Ago

Jasmina Danowski at Spanierman Modern

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 15, 2011

Yesterday evening saw the opening of an exhibition of new abstract florals, or floral abstractions, by Jasmina Danowski at Spanierman Modern. According to the gallery, "Danowski's paintings carry reminiscences of nature and still life, but their force…

Climb the Black Mountain

Elisabeth Condon at Lesley Heller

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 12, 2011

"Exploded pours of paint determine the initial compositions in my paintings," according to Elisabeth Condon, whose exhibition at Lesley Heller Workspace opens this evening, 6-8 PM. "To their improvisational shapes and translucent colors I add images…

Everything at a Distance Turns into Poetry

Rooms with a View at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 11, 2011

"During the Romantic era, the open window appeared either as the sole subject or the main feature in many pictures of interiors that were filled with a poetic play of light and perceptible silence," according to a statement from the Metropolitan…

Reconfigured Images

Jack Pierson and Elliott Puckette at Danziger Projects

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 8, 2011

An exhibition currently on display at Danziger Projects shows work by two contrasting collagists, each with their own pictorial charms. "Based
 on
 the
 artists’
 interest
 in
 the
 practice
 of
…

70 Years of Abstract Painting at Jason McCoy Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 5, 2011

This evening, 6-8 PM, an opening reception will take place for a promising exhibition that covers a generous, ambitious span of abstract painting. It includes prototypical examples like Josef Albers and Jackson Pollock, the West Coast giant John…

Thinness and Thickness

Susanna Heller at John Davis Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
April 4, 2011

Susanna Heller, a New York City native and Brooklyn resident, is exhibiting a recent series of fraught, encrusted, largely small-scale paintings that smolder with intensity and troubled reflection. "A painting, like a walk, connects the physical…

An Excavation of Quiet Ambience

Jimbo Blachly's "Lanquidity" at Winkleman Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 25, 2011

Jimbo Blachly has returned to painting after a 30-year hiatus, working in a manner informed by his employment in a conservation studio that brings him into close contact with twentieth century paintings. "Intimate, fragmentary, allusive, Blachly’s…

Landed All With Sweet Flowers

Antonio Murado's Ophelia at Von Lintel

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 23, 2011

"[Antonio] Murado is an extraordinarily versatile painter with a voracious and omnivorous appetite for source material," according to Von Lintel Gallery, where his paintings inspired by Shakespeare's Ophelia go on display in an exhibition opening…

Color Moves

Sonia Delaunay at Cooper-Hewitt

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 21, 2011

Sonia Delaunay was an active force in bringing the discoveries of Cubism and abstraction into the applied arts. “By showing her work at Cooper-Hewitt, the constant interplay between art and design will be strong and clear and by virtue of Delaunay’s…

Stepping Up with Thornton Willis

"In the Grid" at Elizabeth Harris Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 18, 2011

A senior figure in American abstraction, Thornton Willis is nearing his 75th birthday and painting at a high a level as ever. Working forward from a 2009 exhibition which saw him using a post-and-lintel formation to build his pictures, he has moved on…

Getaways and Vacationlands

Christina Shurts at RARE Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 16, 2011

Christina Shurts, who is already widely exhibited in California, will make her New York debut tomorrow at RARE Gallery. " The imagery in Shurts' paintings is derived from memories, relics of her childhood, personal photographs, decor magazines, and…

The Subtle Light of Ellen Phelan

"Landscapes and Still Lifes: A Selection" at Gasser & Grunert

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 11, 2011

Ellen Phelan is showing a suite of oil paintings at Gasser & Grunert that one might be tempted to call neo-Tonalist. Her soft, enveloping renderings of the Adirondack forests "capture a remarkable range of darkness and soft light, emotional high notes…

A Brush With Asia

Helen Frankenthaler at Knoedler & Company

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 6, 2011

There are mere days left to investigate an intriguing exhibition at Knoedler & Company of works by Helen Frankenthaler that were inspired by Asian art. "Always one to set the bar high for herself, the artist is calling attention to her frank desire to…

You Will Meet A Tall, Handsome Stranger… On The Bowery

Newly attributed portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi goes on view at Sperone Westwater

By DAVID COHEN
January 8, 2011

Think Bowery and it is either the New Museum or the Bowery Mission that likely springs to mind. But right now it is also the place to view something whose rarity and finesse belies both associations: a newly discovered portrait by the most famous…

A Remarkable Posthumous Debut

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky at Galerie St. Etienne

By DAVID COHEN
December 27, 2010

The final, short gallery-going week of the year is also New York’s last chance to catch a remarkable posthumous debut. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, an artist who spent a long lifetime operating under the radar, is the subject of a comprehensive…

A Beauty By Beckmann Stands Out Amidst The Throng

On View At The Piers As Part Of The Armory Show

By DAVID COHEN, Publisher/Editor of artcritical.com
February 22, 2011

On view through Sunday. New York also hosts the ADAA's Art Show, Volta, Pulse, Scope, Red Dot, The Independent and more. The city is awash with art.

Synchronicity at Columbia

A show of quirky abstraction closes Friday while a source of inspiration for some of its artists, Richard Tuttle, lectures tonight

By DAVID COHEN
October 28, 2010

Up at Columbia’s LeRoy Neiman Gallery MFA student Nora Griffin – well-known already downtown and before her enrollment as a writer on the Brooklyn Rail and an exhibiting artist – has organized and is taking part in a show of quirky, whimsical, often…

Street Smarts

New York debut of Rose Wylie, newly celebrated Brit

By DAVID COHEN
October 18, 2010

Most viewers of Rose Wylie’s show at Thomas Erben Gallery, titled “WHAT with WHAT”, would want to conclude that the rambunctious, street-smart brutalism on display there is the work of an inner city kid who has been introduced with reluctance to the…

Writhing Forms

Annabeth Rosen's ceramics in a late and startling debut at Chelsea's Meulensteen

By DAVID COHEN
October 13, 2010

Annabeth Rosen is not just holder of the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California Davis in name but truly in spirit as well, extending the legacy of the legendary Arneson in a quest for fully sculptural expression through ceramic…

Beach Beauty

Connie Fox's latest show, titled Sammy's Beach, opens in the Hamptons this weekend

By DAVID COHEN
July 9, 2010

Connie Fox, for thirty years and counting a year-round veteran of the legendary East Hampton art community, has been the subject of over sixty shows across a distinguished career, but is still what you'd have to call a painter's painter. Her quirky…

Mug Shot

Simon Gaon's Small Portraits on show at AFP Galleries, New York

By DAVID COHEN
July 2, 2010

Simon Gaon is a straight-up expressionist. He conveys rich, strong feelings about his surroundings, insisting on directness both of application and observation. New York born and trained, his style and sensibility are nonetheless directly European…

A Letter From The Louvre: The Art Makes Up For A Lot

By BRENDAN BERNHARD
June 22, 2010

It was the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset who in 1930 described in calm, lapidary prose the sheer press of modern life: “Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafes full of customers…

Billboard Syncopations

James Hyde at Pierogi 2000 Boiler Room

By DAVID COHEN
June 22, 2010

The Stuart Davis Group are high jinks riffs on that jazzy pioneer's painterly syncopations.

Tunnel of Discovery

Christopher Cook's mysteries in liquid graphite up through Saturday at Mary Ryan Gallery

By DAVID COHEN
June 17, 2010

British artist Christopher Cook's third solo show with Mary Ryan Gallery is titled "Concrete Firmament". His motif of freeway tunnels and his medium of liquid graphite on aluminum are exquisitely matched. The images are slippery, elusive, almost sly…

Engineering Optimism

By DAVID COHEN
June 14, 2010

By the time Stalin coined the phrase “engineer of the soul” to describe the ideal Soviet artist his regime had already crushed the visionary Russian art movement to which the term would actually have been applicable: Constructivism. The suppressed impulse of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International enjoyed an unlikely afterlife, however, in the career of a Shanghai-born, California-raised Italian-American abstractionist.

TWISTER

By DAVID COHEN
June 10, 2010

It is little surprise that the debut art exhibition of septuagenarian poet John Giorno should be “in your face.” An inveterate experimenter with new formats for poetry performance, Giorno pioneered what he called “Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments" in response to the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and then honed his performance technique from visits to rock venues in the company of William S. Burroughs.

Tunnel Vision

By DAVID COHEN
May 24, 2010

As the judiciously selected and stunningly installed exhibition at Tate Britain demonstrates, the 1930s were Henry Moore’s most fecund and innovative period of sculptural experimentation, confirming him as a leader of the modern movement in Britain. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, saw abrupt changes in output and outlook alike.

Wintour’s Eyes

By DAVID COHEN
May 16, 2010

According to Alex Katz, speaking publicly at London’s National Portrait Gallery on Friday with Nation art critic Barry Schwabsky and the Gallery’s director, Sandy Nairne, Americans size up someone immediately by their clothes and their haircut. (For Brits, by contrast, it is accent that determines class, and for the French, sentence structure.) He insists his portraits, like all his work, contains all the information in its surface, and that he has no interest in psychology.

Chaste Yet Ravishing

By DAVID COHEN
May 10, 2010

Some think of Tel Aviv in relation to Israel as being like New York in America, the deliciously decadent heart of an otherwise puritanical land. Philip Pearlstein’s lithograph of a model seated amidst weathervanes is the suitably chaste yet ravishing Gala Print for the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s big New York fundraiser taking place Thursday at the Metropolitan Club.

Start Your Engines

By DAVID COHEN
April 30, 2010

The streaming, fluttering cardinal red forms of Russell Roberts’ Talking Engines of Our Day #5, 2005, are at once redolent of flags and limbs. They are strident against a dense moiré of textured ground yet also vulnerable, both in their tapering irregularity and their propensity to allow the ambiguous space behind to peep through their thin, veiling strokes.

"Nudes and Revolutions" Through a Glass Darkly

Sebastiaan Bremer at Edwynn Houk Gallery

By FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH
March 14, 2011

Sebastiaan Bremer draws in inks and dyes upon photographic mashups of his own creation. The results are hallucinatory, vaguely Victorian, erotic, and caliginous. "Utilizing the artist’s signature style of obsessively applied dots of paint onto a…

Crockery Heaven

The Exuberant Sculptures of Joan Bankemper at Nancy Hoffman Gallery

By DAVID COHEN
January 25, 2011

If the souls of crockery and tchochkes are destined for divine judgement then a well-behaved tea platter, ornament or china centerpiece equivalent of dying and going to heaven would be to end up in a sculpture by Joan Bankemper. "Sojourn" currently on…

Orgy in the Raw

Le Tableau, Curated by Joe Fyfe, at Cheim & Read Gallery, New York

By DAVID COHEN
June 28, 2010

Joe Fyfe, a painter known for his stark, almost belligerently informal abstraction, is also a critic and curator. In “Le Tableau,” a geographically and historically wide-angled summer group exhibition at Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery that he has…

 

Jazz

Getting Down to Bass-ics

By WILL FRIEDWALD, Special to the Sun
January 31, 2010

Considering that his day job consists of helping other people make their own music – for nearly 50 years he's been one of the busiest bass players in New York – the songs of Jay Leonhart are amazingly personal. Mr. Leonhart has launched what might be his most ambitious venture as a bandleader and star, taking his own trio (with trumpeter Michael Leonhart, and his son, pianist Ted Rosenthal) into the Metropolitan Room for a month of Wednesdays.

Jazz DVDs Invite You To Watch and Learn

Eri Yamamoto Finds the Keys to the City

Kern's Killer Soprano

Ahmad Jamal Strikes Up the Orchestra

Raising Jazz's Unimpeachable Spirit

A World of Jazz

Singing in the City

Cue the Violins

You Don't Know Jack Jones

 

Books

Remembering the Reporter Who Inspired 'On the Waterfront'

By SAUL ROSENBERG
July 26, 2010

In May 1948, in a scene that might have come from a gangster movie, a man leapt out of a sedan and fired seven shots at a stevedore named Tom Collentine, three into his prostrate body. As had become routine in previous decades, most New York papers…

How Quest for American Dominance Drove Roosevelt, Eisenhower

By SAUL ROSENBERG
June 27, 2010

Delivering a magisterial account of Franklin Roosevelt’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s roles in World War II, situated within their separate lives and presidencies, may seem an outright impossibility in the space of 100 pages. Yet it is what Philip Terzian has done in Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.

A Towering Spiritual Leader Finds His Biographers, At Last

By SAUL ROSENBERG
June 21, 2010

Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the subject of an important new biography by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, professors at City University and Israel’s Bar Ilan respectively. They describe how Menachem Mendel partially separated himself from Chabad as a Parisian engineer, returning to the fold in flight from the Nazis, shortly afterwards to emerge as Chabad’s undisputed spiritual leader.

Greece in the Shadow of the Nazis

By SAUL ROSENBERG
June 8, 2010

In the most common type of thriller – conservatively, 99 examples out of 100 – a protagonist pieces together puzzling events until the dastardly plans of an antagonist are discovered – and there ensues a game of cat and mouse, or a race against time, so that the good guy(s) can defuse the bomb, or stop the speeding bus, or whatever, five seconds before the world explodes.

Half Way There

By SAUL ROSENBERG
May 26, 2010

Christopher Hitchens is prolific indeed. Now, after books on a dozen subjects from Cyprus to Jefferson, Paine, and, most recently, the general badness of religion, he turns his attention inwards in Hitch-22, named for the paradoxical style of Catch-22. Hitch-22’s chief paradox is that of simultaneously maintaining against militant Islamic absolutists and Western relativists that “there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them.”

Trading Places: ‘Famous Amis’ Runs Into ‘Hitch-22’

By BRENDAN BERNHARD, Special to the Sun
May 21, 2010

Probity, Not Policy

Two Timely Reiusses

By Saul Rosenberg, Special to the Sun
April 26, 2010

American public anger at its financial system has perhaps not run higher in almost a century. Banks are booking record profits while the American consumer on the other end of what was a shared crisis just a year go continues to struggle. Curiously, at about the same time 1st quarter results came out, two volumes at once very different and very much to the point were reissued to little notice on the same day by General Books, a club that republishes classics...

All Alone: Two New Books on Loneliness

Jonathan Ames Gets Real in a Graphic Novel

Drowning in the Desert: Miriam Toews's 'The Flying Troutmans'

 

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