Copyright 2012 The New York Sun Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:47:13 -0500 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Arts+ :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/arts admin@nysun.net (Seth Lipsky) webmaster@nysun.com en-us FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-resonance-of-objects/87710/ Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:58:45 EST Tomorrow evening in Los Angeles, an exhibition of new paintings by Tom Gregg will open at George Billis Gallery's West Coast location. "This most recent body of work is inspired by Tom Gregg's fascination with objects and the powerful resonance that they have in his world," says the gallery. "It is their association with the people who acquire them which gives power and energy to their presence." Says the artist, "It is the existence that they possess of their own, their own 'life' in the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/gauguin-and-polynesia/87705/ Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:46:15 EST An exhibition of Paul Gauguin organized by Art Center Basel has opened at its one stop in the United States, the Seattle Art Museum. "Highlighting the complex relationship between Gauguin's work and the art and culture of Polynesia," according to the museum, it displays nearly 60 of the post-Impressionist master's paintings alongside "major examples of forceful Polynesian sculpture." "'Gauguin and Polynesia' traces Gauguin's journey from bourgeois stockbroker to full-time artist, while at the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/things-left/87701/ Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:43:26 EST Figurative painter Erin Raedeke is having her first solo exhibition in New York City this month, and the works on display are impressive. "Erin Raedeke explores complex relationships by observing the detritus of everyday life," according to First Street Gallery. "In 'Things Left,' the still life becomes a vehicle for grappling with unresolved thoughts and memories. The viewer enters the paintings as if they were entering a play mid-scene. The elusive plot is not unlike the subconscious... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/renoir-full-on-at-the-frick/87696/ Wed, 8 Feb 2012 08:19:27 EST 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," according to the museum. "The format was associated with the official Paris Salon from the mid-1870s to mid-1880s, the decade that saw the emergence of a fully fledged Impressionist aesthetic. "The project was inspired by Renoir's La Promenade of... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/johann-zoffany-ra-society-observed/87689/ Fri, 3 Feb 2012 15:15:24 EST 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. His work is present in few American collections, he altered the spelling of his name several times, and his peripatetic life bewildered later chroniclers of English painting. His contemporaries included Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth, and... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/immersion-in-painting/87687/ Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:03:34 EST 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 is richly descriptive while in fact depicting nothing. Maybe a white-over-blue passage turns into a patch of sky, and the lollipop shapes become trees, but that’s as specific as it gets. The rest of the painting consists of colors that you would... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-enchanted-landscape/87678/ Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:25:28 EST 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 from all phases of the important French Baroque artist’s production,” according to the museum. “Based on the most recent results of scientific research, the comprehensive exhibition comprises a high-caliber selection of paintings as well as Claude... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/fifty-vellums/87675/ Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:43:08 EST "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 color in a way reminiscent of the application of tusche on a lithography stone. The translucent cast allows overspills to creep around the back surface and appear on the front in a 'ghosting' fashion." George Lawson Gallery in Culver City, which is... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/intimate-sketches-of-new-york-city/87660/ Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:15:45 EST Readers of the New York Sun have a new opportunity to own a piece of the paper's history. Vernon Howe Bailey produced a series of pen and ink drawings depicting New York City and environs during the 1930s. For a time, they appeared daily in the New York Sun as "Intimate Sketches of New York City." These drawings were preserved by William T. Dewart, editor of the Sun when the paper shut down in 1950. "Bailey was a versatile artist who practiced painting, printmaking, and illustration," according... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/tactility-as-mysticism/87651/ Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:11:07 EST 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 University, and whose paintings are on exhibit at the gallery. “As with any meditative process, his work appears deceptively simple: thickened oil paint is applied, one stroke at a time with a palette knife, in soft peaks to a canvas over a period of... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/saving-face-at-the-met/87645/ Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:14:40 EST "It has been said," according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in regards to its current special exhibition of Renaissance portraiture, "that the Renaissance witnessed the rediscovery of the individual. In keeping with this notion, early Renaissance Italy also hosted the first great age of portraiture in Europe. Portraiture assumed a new importance, whether it was to record the features of a family member for future generations, celebrate a prince or warrior, extol the beauty of a woman, or... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/america-the-beautiful/87637/ Thu, 5 Jan 2012 22:07:31 EST On January 16, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a reinstallation of its collection of American art in "expanded, reconceived, and dramatic new galleries." "This final phase of the American Wing renovation project is comprised of twenty-six renovated and enlarged galleries on the second floor," according to the museum. "The new architectural design is a contemporary interpretation of nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts galleries, including coved ceilings and natural light flowing through new... Last Chance to see "Last Paintings" http://www.nysun.com/arts/joan-mitchell-becomes-the-sunflower/87633/ Wed, 4 Jan 2012 08:26:01 EST "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 subject finds precedence in the plein air and Impressionist painters a century before," according to the gallery. "As Richard D. Marshall elucidates in his essay, Mitchell admired Cézanne, Monet and Van Gogh; their interpretations of the same... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/rembrandts-finest-student/87628/ Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:17:29 EST An exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is exploring the affinities of two of the greatest painters of all time. "By examining Rembrandt’s work—and his prints in particular—Degas discovered an approach to portraiture and self-portraiture that emphasized the expressive and technical potential of the form, an approach that was not encouraged in Degas’s traditional early training," says the museum. "After enrolling briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he soon began... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/too-great-a-nation-for-small-dreams/87622/ Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:58:29 EST "When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980," says the National Portrait Gallery, "it was the conventional wisdom, after what was viewed as four failed presidencies, that the office had outgrown the individual and needed to be changed or perhaps held jointly. Within a short time after Reagan became president, however, whether one agreed with his policies or not, there was no doubt about his capacity and command of the office, and the discussion about the need to change the office of the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/diego-rivera-keeps-up-the-fight/87619/ Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:36:29 EST The exhibition "Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art" reunites, for the first time in 80 years, five "portable murals," freestanding frescoes with bold images addressing the Mexican Revolution and Depression-era New York that Rivera created at the Museum for his 1931-32 MoMA exhibition. The murals, which are up to six feet by eight feet in size and weigh as much as 1,000 pounds, are made of frescoed plaster, concrete, and steel. Comprising five of the eight murals that were shown... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-indefatigable-abstractionist/87617/ Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:48:18 EST 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 studio practice in a former synagogue on the Lower East Side. Having survived her husband, the painter Milton Resnick, by seven years, she continued to paint large-scale abstractions with a nervous but knowing touch. Passlof died a few days before... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/head-of-medusa-appears-in-san-francisco/87612/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:44:21 EST The Capitoline Museum has loaned a sculpture of Medusa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini to the San Francisco Legion of Honor, where the cursed beauty graces the City by the Bay through February. "Recent conservation efforts have restored the Medusa to its full glory and revealed previously hidden polish and patina," says the museum. "Believed to date from between 1638 and 1648, this extraordinary work takes its subject from classical mythology, as cited in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It shows the beautiful... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-old-expressionist/87608/ Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:55:11 EST "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 Students’ League, where he studied with Jan Matulka," says the gallery. "From 1932-36, he studied with Hans Hofmann, assisting as Hofmann's studio classroom monitor. In 1936 he worked for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project and... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-art-of-balance/87601/ Fri, 9 Dec 2011 13:37:54 EST 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 as partners in his work. Whether exploring the tensions between abstraction and figuration, fact and fantasy, other and self, his devotion to the human figure was a constant theme." The catalog essay was penned by no less than Hilary Spurling, the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/will-barnet-at-100/87595/ Tue, 6 Dec 2011 09:27:04 EST Will Barnet is still painting. The Beverly, MA native has long divided his time between New York and New England, and by “long,” I mean the last century. It’s fitting that his retrospective, Will Barnet at 100, traveled from the Portland Museum of Art to the National Academy Museum, where it runs through the end of the year. In the 1960s, Barnet swerved into a peculiar take on figuration, which he explored for the next 40 years. This is the work for which he is deservedly known. Barnet hit upon... Special to the Sun http://www.nysun.com/arts/architectural-apparitions/87589/ Sat, 3 Dec 2011 11:55:15 EST They say that the true love of the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was to play the violin. So the expression “violin d’Ingres” emerged to connote the passion of an artist other than his profession. For violist David Zimbalist, the violin d’Ingres is the camera. After bowing his viola for the day, he shoulders his Nikon and scouts Manhattan, where he has been working on a series of photographs of architectural abstractions. Mr. Zimbalest was born in Brooklyn and educated at the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-cubist-experiment/87583/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:44:06 EST In September the Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened what it describes as "the first to unite many of the paintings and nearly all of the prints created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque" during the two years that they worked alongside one another. "During the years 1910 through 1912, Picasso and Braque invented a new style that took the basics of traditional European art—modeling in light and shade to suggest roundedness, perspective lines to suggest space, indeed the very idea of making a... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/modern-antiquity/87576/ Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:03:08 EST "Modern Antiquity," which opened this month at the Getty Villa, is exploring the effect of ancient art on early modernists. “Juxtaposing 20th-century works with ancient objects, this exhibition focuses on how four eminent artists reinvented and transformed the artistic legacy of antiquity,” according to the museum. “Classicizing creations such as Giorgio de Chirico's enigmatic piazzas, Pablo Picasso's postcubist women, Fernand Léger's mechanized nudes, and Francis Picabia's 'transparencies'... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/liquid-on-stone/87567/ Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:17:41 EST 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 would begin with a preparatory sketch in pencil. Artin dives in with watercolor on damp paper, corralling pools of pigment with a brush and a rag until they give her the shape she wants. If you're unfamiliar with the materials, imagine trying to... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/arrested-motion/87563/ Sat, 12 Nov 2011 17:23:04 EST Friedel Dzubas, in your author's opinion one of the neglected greats of Abstract Expressionism, is getting the sort of exhibition that we've come to rely on Loretta Howard to provide: focused, considered, and directed at under-explored facets of American modernism. One might call it museum-quality, except that the last major exhibition of Dzubas took place at the Hirshorn Museum in Washington, D.C. almost thirty years ago, suggesting instead that the museums should be aspiring to the level of... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/visceral-and-visual/87558/ Tue, 8 Nov 2011 14:48:27 EST "Richard Serra's large-scale steel sculptures have made him a crucial figure in contemporary art, but his work also takes another striking, lesser-known form: drawing," according to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is exhibiting what the museum is calling "the first-ever critical overview of Serra's drawings." "This landmark traveling exhibition brings together roughly 70 works made over the course of some 40 years—including many of the artist's sketchbooks that have never been... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-lemon-and-an-orange-side-by-side/87551/ Fri, 4 Nov 2011 09:07:09 EST "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 Acquavella, whose gallery is showing an important exhibition of Braque through November. “The purpose of this retrospective is to present the artist not only as the cocreator of Fauvism and Cubism but also as a profoundly passionate, progressive and... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/high-and-low/87543/ Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:04:40 EST I’d like to examine what happens when you look at an art object and perceive it to have excellence. Let’s say that an artist has made some beautiful thing. You look at it and say, Wow. You experience a pleasant feeling of joy or excitement. Your attention goes to it and lingers there. Also, “excellence,” as I said, implies superiority to other art objects. In the past you have looked at other objects and not perceived excellence in them. Now that you’re looking at this one, the pleasure you get... FRED KIRSHNIT http://www.nysun.com/arts/coucheron-siblings-soar-at-weill-echoing/87540/ Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:22:51 EST One of the greatest joys of a music critic is looking back over a long career and remembering fondly those performers that, as young people, clearly would rise to the upper echelon of performers if indeed that was their wish. At Weill Recital Hall in 2000 I heard Janine Jansen make her American debut at 21, although looking all of 15. I wrote at the time that she was exceptional and on her way. Today she is a superstar and deservedly so. Not every wunderkind craves the limelight. The best young... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/refuge-from-turmoil-in-nature/87538/ Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:40:01 EST "The collapse of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and subsequent conquest of China by semi-nomadic Manchu tribesmen from northeast of the Great Wall comprised some of the most traumatic events in Chinese history," according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose exhibition, "The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China," explores the turbulent era. "This wrenching era also spurred an enormous outpouring of creative energy as many former Ming subjects turned to the arts to express their loyalty to the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/degas-revealed/87529/ Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:50:13 EST “'Degas and the Nude' will be a revelation for our visitors," says Malcolm Rogers, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "It will offer a number of surprises—for instance, we’ll reunite several of Degas’s black-and-white monotypes with the corresponding pastel ‘twins’ for the first time since they left the artist’s studio. Visitors will see the progression of his nudes and the very heart of Degas’s fascination with the body and its range of emotion and movement. He pursued that... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/fte-champtre/87521/ Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:45:16 EST 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 canvases of luxuriously composed still life and social gatherings have the air of an extravagant garden party or celebration," says the gallery. "Often, Ushenko takes liberties, twisting the compositions by juxtaposing people, creatures and objects... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/reinventing-tradition/87510/ Thu, 6 Oct 2011 11:43:27 EST "Drawing was Picasso's primary medium for thinking, problem solving, invention, and personal expression," according to the Frick Collection, whose exhibition of Picasso's drawings opened on Tuesday. "It was the link that connected his work in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, theater design, and ceramics, and was a direct tie to his predecessors. Picasso’s diverse body of original work on paper broke new ground, while also consciously incorporating aspects of the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-hearts-hot-shell/87509/ Tue, 4 Oct 2011 10:16:45 EST 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 Melville's novel Moby-Dick, which references Captain Ahab's obsessive quest for the great white whale in the following sentence: 'He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-master-of-tenth-street/87500/ Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:12:36 EST The Museum of Modern Art has mounted a retrospective of the works of Willem de Kooning that has had the art world in a state of anticipation for several months. According to John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus at MoMA, "The importance of Willem de Kooning as one of the very foremost artists of the New York School is widely accepted, as is his revolutionary importance to modern art as a whole. Far less well understood is what his artistic career actually comprised in its almost seven decades... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/paths-of-the-sun/87490/ Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:58:35 EST 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 of Rome, was begun shortly after Nickson’s arrival there as a recipient of the 1972 Rome Prize. It was in Italy that sunrises and sunsets first became major themes in his work, and the small format landscapes he painted, some of which are grouped... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-art-fair-for-the-artists/87488/ Sat, 17 Sep 2011 21:26:11 EST 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. The novice fairgoer must puzzle to select between one or two dozen fairs that descend on a city during a fairgoing weekend, each sporting one- and two-syllable names, gallerina-staffed cubicles full of art, and aspirations to perfect... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/lights-in-the-expanse-of-the-heavens/87483/ Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:11:40 EST 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 source of inspiration," says Engelhardt. "Light and darkness are present. The pictorial universe can unfold on all planes and at all depths, without foreground and without background; there is no left or right in the sky, no up or down; the vault... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-decade-long-day/87477/ Thu, 8 Sep 2011 09:52:37 EST "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 summer, over 44,000 troops have been wounded in conflicts following the attacks of September 11. Over 1,300 of them have undergone partial or full amputations. 'The Joe Bonham Project' represents the efforts of wartime illustrators to document their... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/interesting-for-no-good-reason/87470/ Fri, 2 Sep 2011 17:13:34 EST 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 painting in which the very brushstrokes inspire admiration. Instead I found a picture of the Statue of Liberty working at an easel plein-aire. Read the whole article at Artcritical. "Lois Dodd: Naked Ladies, Natural Disasters, and Puzzling Events... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-indispensible-fairfield-porter/87451/ Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:19:37 EST Fairfield Porter’s elegant paintings were the subject of a 1983 retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that at once permanently elevated his reputation and ensconced him into a period of modernist figuration that curators have been neglecting, in one form or another, for decades. Fairfield Porter: Raw at the Middlebury College Museum of Art afforded an unusual opportunity to see his work assembled in a serious way. Subtitled The Creative Process of an American Master, the exhibition... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/paintings-that-shouldnt-work/87444/ Thu, 4 Aug 2011 13:22:21 EST 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 color and texture, then to Italian for a bit of structure. Elisabeth Condon can do this, in paint. Hello, Yellow (2010), a four-foot-wide canvas built around pourings of lemon, gold, and umber, evokes the history of stained abstraction, Frankenthaler... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/sweethearts-smokers-and-merrymakers/87439/ Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:41:11 EST The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibition around eleven signed works of Frans Hals, considered by many to be the greatest master of Dutch art after Rembrandt. "Several of the Museum's paintings by Hals are famous, especially the early Merrymakers at Shrovetide and the so-called Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart," according to the museum. "The Metropolitan Museum has two genre scenes by Hals, as well as seven fine portraits dating from the 1620s through the 1650s. Also included in... ERIC GELBER http://www.nysun.com/arts/jane-fine-in-melt-at-the-tang/87437/ Wed, 27 Jul 2011 06:51:21 EST 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 Roth, Frances Simches, Davor Vrankic, and Kevin Wolff are the other artists on view, some represented by prints in the museum’s permanent collection.) This group exhibition, organized by Tang Associate Curator Rachel Seligman, is based on a somewhat... Franklin Einspruch http://www.nysun.com/arts/lucian-freud-1922-2011/87435/ Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:08:54 EST Lucian Freud has died. Not to minimize the sadness this must cause his survivors, his passing has hit a segment of the art world quite hard. "I always wished I could paint like him," says the upstate New York painter Tracy Helgeson, summing up the feelings of many of us who admired his work. Freud had a simple method, which was to arrange for models to pose in his studio for hundreds of hours while he rendered them with a loaded brush. His stroke was planar, slow, and decisive. Flake white... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/krazy-as-muse/87432/ Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:47:36 EST 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 one’s line in the creative waters and tries not to complain about the species of fish that comes up as long as it’s edible. The process entails more humility than heroism, more idle musing than grand inspiration. Walter Darby Bannard’s work took a... DAVID COHEN. http://www.nysun.com/arts/portraits-of-a-floating-world/87424/ Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:37:21 EST 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 socially and economically complex intersections of humanity that range from monastic communities to the red light districts of various Asian cities. The cover painting, depicting a scene in Singapore’s Little India, is titled “Zone of Contact.” For... David Cohen http://www.nysun.com/arts/separating-the-goats-from-the-sheep/87403/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:05:37 EST 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 Emerging Artist Award. Clare Weiss was a pioneering, dynamic curator of public art at New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, a position she held from 2005-2009. Shortly after she arrived at her job Ms Weiss was diagnosed with the cancer that... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-self-taught-outsider-artist/87392/ Wed, 15 Jun 2011 07:30:59 EST Several years ago, in Miami, I had lunch with a fellow artist and a local museum curator. The curator asked us to suggest exhibitions, perhaps something a little off the beaten path for the museum. "Claudio Bravo," I said. In unison they turned to me and replied, "Ecch." If it surprises you that Bravo's work would elicit that reaction, you may be unfamiliar with the extent to which contemporary art tricycles assiduously around its cul-de-sac among the avenues of human culture. Bravo, who passed...