“New York: 1962-1964” is a celebration of the institution hosting it. The Jewish Museum has been a venerable fixture in New York’s cultural firmament for what seems like forever, but six decades ago, under the directorship of Alan Solomon, it was the premier incubator for cutting-edge art when NYC was its undisputed center.
Art News
The curators set a welcome stage for the visitor to the Center. Greeting them at the entrance is Martin Sharp’s Blowing in the Mind/Mister Tambourine Man (1968). Sharp is known as the mastermind behind posters and album covers for some of the biggest names in ’60s rock and roll history.
The Benin Bronzes of Nigeria, their provenance, and the possibility of restitution have been making headlines of late. Currently scattered across the world, this collection of a thousand plus statues and plaques was stolen in 1897 from the African Kingdom of Benin, modern-day Nigeria, by British troops.
Fresh off its survey of Faith Ringgold, the New Museum presents a retrospective of another veteran African American painter whose aesthetic DNA courses through subsequent generations of black artists. “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” is the artist’s first museum outing since 1989.
A new self-portrait from Vincent Van Gogh has recently been detected, hidden under layers of glue and cardboard, by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS). Officials are confident, though not certain, that the painting is a hitherto unknown work of art.
The recent publication Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800, a companion catalogue for a show of the same name and the first comprehensive study of LACMA's notable holdings of Spanish American art, is a remarkable and important piece of work.
Linda Nochlin caused a stir when she published, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in 1971. Turning the conventional wisdom of the title on its head, she clarifies that there have always been great women artists, they've just been written out of the record by men.
Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse: That’s often been the ticket to artistic immortality, even while coming at considerable cost. Such was the case for Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), who passed away from a drug overdose at twenty-seven.
An interior view of Matisse’s atelier in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, "The Red Studio" (1911) serves as the centerpiece for an impressive feat of scholarship that gathers photographs, documents, and ephemera related to the painting’s creation, along with a video on its conservation.
Silenced by the pandemic last year, The Whitney Biennial returns with an exhibition appropriately named Quiet as It’s Kept. The title seems intended to acknowledge an art world suffering from its own version of long Covid after the lockdown blew a gaping hole in the zeitgeist.
