I’m sure most of you have had favorite works of art that you’ve examined repeatedly over the years. They keep us engaged as great art does, telling us more with each viewing and over time we have grown to accept more with our own maturity as viewers and artists.
The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920, an exhibition of “vital naturalism,” now on view at the Florence Griswold Museum
Just what is it about Nicole Eisenman’s work that opened the doors of the Whitney and the New Museum? Why is her work “culturally significant” and the work of generations of figurative painters not?
Of our major artists, J. Alden Weir is one of the least likely to inspire impassioned tribute. It’s not for lack of effort; in fact, the problem is that he tried too hard.
Frieze is a riot of creative expression so visually cacophonous that only the most bizarre and surprising work has a chance of impressing itself on your memory.
Pondering the closing of the National Academy of Design’s home on Fifth Avenue, Eakins’s vulnerable expression, caught between resistance and resignation, may well speak for many artists.
Themes that I’d find irredeemably cornball from any other artist are rescued both by Abbott Thayer’s prickly earnestness and his formal abilities as a draftsman and painter.
Arguably the greatest draftsman of his time, there was nothing fastidious in his thinking. Degas couldn’t wait to find new ways to get his hands dirty.