Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:32:09 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss John Goodrich :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/John+Goodrich istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-origins-of-abstraction-order-and-intuition/86068/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Who painted the first abstraction? Some believe it was Kandinsky, and others Arthur Dove, or the Chicago artist Manierre Dawson. In any event, Americans have had a hand in abstract painting since its very beginnings around 1910. Toward mid-century, a second generation of abstractionists thrived, even with the ascendancy of Social Realism and Regionalism. The American Abstract Artists group was founded in 1936, and works by John Ferren, Ilya Bolotowsky, and other Americans were exhibited at the... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-auspicious-launch-for-new-yorks-haunch/85587/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The inaugural exhibition at the New York branch of Haunch of Venison — the contemporary art gallery with spaces in London, Zürich, and Berlin — is notable on several accounts. "Abstract Expressionism — A World Elsewhere" is an ambitious show, representing one of the most comprehensive surveys of New York School painting and sculpture in recent decades. The gallery's location is itself unusual, occupying the top two floors of a 49th Street high-rise office building. And, as wary dealers have... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/tearing-down-the-walls-of-their-world-momas/85139/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Robert Rauschenberg's goal of operating "in the gap between life and art," famously uttered in 1959, anticipates the less polite mantra of the '60s: Tear down the walls. For artists, the walls in question were the divisions between aesthetic conventions and empirical experience, between the museum space and the world at large, and, not least, the barriers among the various media. In the mid-'60s, new electronic-music technologies and the invention of the Portapak (a handheld video camera)... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/political-art-love-it-or-leave-it/84765/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Political art is a polymorphous genre. An instrument of both independent protest and totalitarian control, it embraces everything between gentle social commentary and strident advocacy. The sense of outrage that motivated much art of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s can be traced to Goya's "Disasters of War," but today's artists have long since discarded Goya's pictorial acumen for a variety of confrontational tactics: Barbara Kruger's tabloid-style admonitions ("Your Body is a Battleground"), for... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/original-copies-the-art-of-appropriation-at-moma/83818/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Pipe, glass, bottle of rum: Spoken aloud, the words have the beat of a carnival barker's cry or a drummer's rim shot. Connected to Picasso, they conjure charging lines and unlikely angles that somehow coalesce as tangible objects. It's this genius for design that makes Picasso a legitimate heir to masters such as Cézanne and Goya, but his work fascinates, too, for its extraordinarily inventive use of materials. Around 1912, when Picasso and Braque pioneered the practice of incorporating into... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/totally-rad-the-irony-and-agony-of-the-80s-art/82920/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST In midsummer, when many galleries wrap up the season with group shows, Paul Kasmin Gallery is adding a welcome twist to an old routine. "Totally Rad" combines works by several gallery artists with significant additional paintings, sculptures, and photographs to offer a plangent sampling of New York art from the "go-go 80s." The decade of the 1980s saw the resurgence of painting and conceptual art under hyphenated labels ("Neo-Expressionism," "Neo-Conceptualism," "Neo-Geo") that reflected the... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/devotional-objects-retablos-at-paul-thiebaud/82504/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the most reliable rewards of folk art is its honesty: the straightforward methods and materials of its making, and the directness of its purpose. The small devotional paintings known as retablos are especially poignant for their frank demonstrations of faith. Produced by the thousands by anonymous 19th-century Mexican artists, these images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and countless saints were placed in home altars and left at pilgrimage sites. Today they intrigue particularly for their... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/classic-picasso-plus-a-dimension/81606/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Since its founding nearly 80 years ago, the Museum of Modern Art has placed Picasso at the center of its narrative of Modernism, and supported this viewpoint with impressive exhibitions of his work and a superb collection of his paintings. Less familiar to many museumgoers is his sculpture, a medium to which he periodically returned during his long career, but only occasionally exhibited. The first comprehensive show of these works took place when the artist was in his mid-80s, and this facet... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/cut-and-paste-then-and-now/81192/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Shortly before World War I, the Cubists began incorporating bits of their physical environment — printed images, text, and patterns — into their work to heighten its spatial paradoxes. So was born the medium of collage. Today, the tenets of Cubism hold no special sway for most artists, but the medium of collage thrives. Always intriguing for its invocations of materiality and process, collage also lends itself especially well to the discordant, composite narratives of much contemporary art. It... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/salvador-dalis-super-reality/80734/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Salvador Dalí (1904-89) considered himself a prophet and a genius, and much of the world agrees, judging from the popularity of his prints and the several museums devoted to his work. Critics have tended to be less enthusiastic about the flamboyant Catalonian, whose promotional stunts and forays into fashion and advertising helped make him a household name. In recent years, a spate of exhibitions commemorating the centennial of his birth has prompted a reassessment. "Dalí: Painting and Film,"... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/cezanne-at-the-heart-of-the-guggenheim/80311/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Under the stewardship of departing director Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim has become the cosmopolitan highflier of New York museums, with new branches in Bilbao, Spain, and Berlin, and visions of others in a startling number of locations: Lower Manhattan, Las Vegas, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, Lithuania, and Abu Dhabi. Guggenheim outposts operated for several years in the first two places. A branch three times the size of the Bilbao museum is slated to open in Abu Dhabi in 2011... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/out-of-postmodernist-flash-innocent-pleasures/78815/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Picture an installation of Contemporary East Asian art, and something distinctly Postmodernist comes to mind — something along the lines, say, of Takashi Murakami's eye-jolting, cartoonlike characters, or Cai Guo-Qiang's simulated exploding cars. In this company, the paintings of the South Korean artist Oh Chi-Gyun (b. 1956) take surprisingly innocent pleasure in one of the conventions of Western art. His Impressionist landscapes and cityscapes vary between the poignant and sentimental, and... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/gutenbergs-glorious-text/76850/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST According to some, the printed word — those paper-borne squiggles of ink you're currently gazing at — will be obsolete in another generation or two. This, of course, remains to be seen, and in the meantime the Morgan Library's installation of its three Gutenberg Bibles provides a glorious reminder of the aesthetic virtues of printed text. It also illuminates the early challenges posed by the letterpress, an invention that revolutionized human communication, and spread, little changed over the... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/stepping-out-from-the-taverns-and-tenements/76092/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST John Sloan (1871-1951), a leader of the Ashcan School, pioneered not so much a new style of painting as a new subject matter: the urban working class, depicted with unsentimental affection at work and play. Sloan lived his political beliefs, joining the Socialist party and drawing politically charged illustrations for such journals as the Masses, for which he also served as art editor. The power of his paintings, however, depends not on polemics but on frank depictions of ordinary people... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/grace-hartigan-at-aca/75219/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Grace Hartigan (b. 1922) is one of the few remaining members of the generation transformed by Abstract Expressionism and, judging from the assurance and humor of her life work, she has enjoyed the experience more than most. If the canvases of her colleagues Pollock and de Kooning exude both liberation and tribulation, Ms. Hartigan's radiate something more like a wholesome lyricism. Next to the paintings of Joan Mitchell — so grittily invested in a particular attack — Ms. Hartigan's feel... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/morgans-medieval-hunt/75202/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometimes, the upkeep of artwork has serendipitous side benefits. At the Morgan Library, the temporary unbinding of the manuscript "Le Livre de la Chasse" for conservation purposes has occasioned a unique treat: an installation displaying most of its 87 remarkable miniatures. Produced around 1407 by unknown scribes and illuminators, the Morgan manuscript illustrates the hunting treatise written by Gaston Phoebus for his friend and fellow hunter Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Forty-six... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/raw-impetuous/74839/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Modern Germany, for reasons that could fill a hundred dissertations, has bequeathed the art world several generations of bombastic, figurative expressionists, from Max Beckmann (1884–1950) to Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) to Neo Rauch (b. 1960). Extending this tradition is Mr. Rauch's contemporary, Daniel Richter (b. 1962, no relation to Gerhard Richter), whose raw, impetuous paintings are currently on view in his second solo show at David Zwirner. To the traditions of alienation and disquiet, Mr... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/bathing-beauties/74887/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Bathers on shorelines have inspired many a painter, from Cézanne to Picasso to Prendergast. And no wonder — the motif combines some of the most exquisite potentialities of gesture and sunlight. Contemporary painter James Farrelly (b. 1959), too, has dedicated himself to the subject, and 12 of his recent efforts currently appear in his first solo exhibition at Lohin Geduld. Mr. Farrelly's more than two decades as a resident of Rome show in these paintings' sunny lyricism. The intensity of his... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/locating-truth-within-a-grand-illusion/74075/ Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Painting is an illusion to which all artists add their own sleight-of-hand. Seven centuries ago, Giotto ennobled his subjects with momentous pacings of forms. In the modern era, Magritte's literalistic rendering suited his surreal mischief-making; Chuck Close's 1970s paintings took literalism to its conceptual extreme. The abstracted landscapes in Julian Hatton's seventh show at Elizabeth Harris are less "real" in terms of factual description, but they contain their own peculiar truths, evident... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/storytelling-stall-by-stall/73703/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Like a great many younger artists today, Tabaimo (b. 1975) combines a number of media and jump-starts the mixture with new technologies. What sets this Japanese video artist apart is the discipline and insight with which she updates one very traditional genre. Her images of contemporary urban scenes, rendered in the style of ukiyo-e woodblocks, attain a strange and unnerving beauty, thanks to her exquisite skills as an illustrator, her filmmaker's instincts, and her subtle but quirky social... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/modern-british-florilegium/73312/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The plant studies of Leonardo and Dürer move us not just as remarkable works of art, but also by the faith they show in the accord between artistic and scientific inquiry. Expectations of art and science have changed since the Renaissance, but the practice of botanical art continued to flourish, most notably in the 17th through 19th centuries, in the form of florilegia — collections of images of plants from a particular garden. A handsome exhibition at the New York School of Interior Design... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/koreas-ravishing-screens/72934/ Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Though premodern Korea represented one of the world's longest continuous civilizations, its art for many Americans remains overshadowed by that of China and Japan. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Beauty and Learning" — a modestly sized but ravishing exhibition — is the first in this country to focus on a unique genre of Korean art, the ch'aekkori folding screen. The painted folding screen originated in China, where it eventually evolved into a highly carved and decorated form of furniture. As... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/self-possessed-passion/72415/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST By itself, sincerity is insufficient to make a great work of art. Still, the Abstract Expressionists got plenty of mileage out of it, with soul-baring, chest-thumping canvases that rank among the greatest achievements of American art. But like everyone else, the members of the New York School came in all shapes and sizes, including the self-effacing and well-mannered James Brooks (1906–92). At Greenberg Van Doren, the current installation of 12 paintings by Brooks argues for the more... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/factory-guy/71641/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Landscape painting is traditionally a vehicle for capturing effects of weather, light, and space — in short, for goals that may seem a bit shopworn for some gallery-goers today. At a glance, these appear to be the intentions of Greg Lindquist (b. 1979), whose paintings of abandoned factories and warehouses radiate a romantically desolate air. A second look, however, finds hardly a trace of sentimentality in these nine canvases at Elizabeth Harris. His rendering technique is efficiently... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/drama-in-the-margins/70540/ Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST According to painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939), his upbringing by actor parents cured him of any interest in theatrics, and the presumptuous claims made for abstract painting drove him toward representation. Drama of another kind, however, abounds in his intense, peculiarly non-picturesque scenes of urban and rural sites. Beneath his exacting technique lie original perceptions and ferociously focused thinking. His nearly 20 recent paintings at the Betty Cuningham Gallery have a kind of... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/cutting-edge-conflict/70128/ Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The state of anxious, entrenched confliction — of both imagery and technique — has become a mainstay of cutting-edge figurative painting, from the chameleon-like styles of Sigmar Polke to the bizarre, acidic narratives of Neo Rauch. With her first solo exhibition in New York, the German-born, Antwerp-based Kati Heck (b. 1979) enters this crowded field, applying a unique blend of boisterousness and diligence to familiar idioms. Ms. Heck's six large paintings all depict self-absorbed characters... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/pulling-his-polemical-punches/69683/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST In recent decades, avant-garde art has become a viable profession for the energetic and the plucky – and especially the young, driven artists with an eye for trends and a quirky vision. This last ingredient may be the most crucial of all, but it's also the most difficult to cultivate. Currently on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem is the work of one accomplished young artist who clearly has his own voice, as well as something to say. The 30 photographs, sculptural installations, and... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/deposit-of-portraits/69297/ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Step past the ATMs and the teller windows at 350 Park Ave. and encounter a pleasant surprise: a bright, 15-foot-square art gallery. This small but elegant exhibition space, open to the public during regular business hours, is Park Avenue Bank's gift of culture to New York City. Since 2006, the gallery's "Meet a Museum" program has presented work from an impressive series of institutions, including the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Jewish Museum, and the New-York Historical Society. The current... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/intelligent-design-2007-12-27/68652/ Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST From the very beginning, painters depicted the technology of their time. Prehistoric artists at Lascaux immortalized their spears in hunting scenes, Monet painted steam locomotives, and James Rosenquist an F-111 fighter-bomber. The lightning-fast parsing of computer languages and the streaming of multi-gigabyte files would seem to present new challenges to the artist. "Machine Learning" at the Painting Center, however, explores abstract impressions of technology rather than the physical... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/bohemian-rhapsody/67994/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST One of the tangential intrigues of art is the Bohemian lifestyle that often attends it — that liberated, marginal existence that feeds upon and nourishes creative intensity. The painter Janice Biala (1903–2000) lived such a life and lived it to the very fullest. Her résumé sounds like a potboiler: Overcoming a precarious childhood, she pursued a seven-decade-long career that spanned the art worlds of both New York and Paris, and befriended many of the giants of art and literature on both sides... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/quick-change-artist/67613/ Thu, 6 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST If your current travel plans don't include a trip to Baltimore, you may just want to reconsider. "Matisse: Painter as Sculptor" is one of the don't-miss shows of the season, comprising n o t just some 50 remarkable sculptures by the French master, but also a ravishing assortment of his drawings and paintings. Works by Rodin, Degas, Picasso, Brancusi, Cézanne, Giacometti, and other masters round out the show. It offers that rare experience: a fresh appreciation of a familiar lifework, delivered... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/mets-object-lesson/67631/ Thu, 6 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST What a difference a little straightening up makes. The Metropolitan Museum's New Galleries for 19th- and Early 20th-Century European Paintings and Sculpture have reopened, with new lighting, new architectural trim, a certain re-shuffling of artworks — and a whole new series of galleries on the south side. The results are impressive, with a more intelligible arrangement of artistic movements and many works displayed to better advantage. There's also a number of never-before-seen works tucked... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/meandering-through-time/67230/ Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The Seurat and Puryear shows may be the biggest draws at the Museum of Modern Art right now, but gallery-goers shouldn't overlook two other intriguing exhibitions that draw on the museum's own collections. "Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now" employs three broad categories as a hopeful means of organizing a bewildering assortment of post-1970 art. The works in "New Perspectives in Latin American Art" meander in a different way — physically, across two floors — with artworks spanning... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/textbook-take-on-painting/66104/ Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST In painting, it's easier to advertise the transcendent than to produce it; easier to offer up mere flurries of strokes or generic symbols than pictorially eloquent forms. Bernard Chaet, however, is a painter who can extract remarkable expressions from fairly conventional means. Known to countless students for his classic textbook on drawing, the 83-year-old artist's work is currently on view at two Midtown galleries. His expressionistic watercolors and oil paintings ply a well-worn course... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/sober-with-the-sweet/65653/ Thu, 1 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST By all accounts, William Steig (1907–2003) was in person the same contradictory individual we sensed for decades in his New Yorker cartoons and children's books. He was wise but naďve, gruff but gentle, doubtful yet essentially optimistic. This Sunday, the Jewish Museum celebrates the centennial of Steig's birth with an exhibition of some 200 works showing his astonishing diversity as a cartoonist, an illustrator, a writer, and even a sculptor. Although small in dimensions — as required for... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/bucking-the-trend/65658/ Thu, 1 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Abstract-Expressionism exemplified the courage and conviction of American art at mid-century, but by the late 1950s, resisting its ascendancy took another kind of bravery. Two current shows concentrate on the formative years of artists who bucked the trend to pursue representational painting. Rosemarie Beck (1923–2003) enjoyed early success working in an Abstract Expressionist vein, but it left her unfulfilled. Her 10 paintings at Lori Bookstein show the intriguing progression of her work in... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/painting-the-city-red-etc/65403/ Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST What happens when an excourtroom sketch artist applies his lightning-quick rendering skills to the streets of New York City? In the case of Tom Christopher, the result is "Metropolis," an exhibition in the lobby of the Condé Nast Building of wildly exuberant images of taxis, buses, and bicyclists careening down city streets. The 55-year-old Mr. Christopher, known to many as New York's "unofficial artist in residence," is in fact no newcomer to Times Square, having painted the area and other... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/rendering-reality/65230/ Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Exactitude is not truth, as Delacroix and other notable artists have reminded us. What, then, is "real" in painting? Current exhibitions show how three veteran painters have found their own truths in the visible world. For four decades now, William Bailey has produced images of still lifes and figures that teeter poignantly between the idealized and the perceived. Produced entirely from memory, his paintings forsake surprises of color and texture for an intense investigation of geometries and... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/masterworks-on-display-and-on-hold/64805/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST As one of the city's premier galleries for over three decades, Salander-O'Reilly has mounted numerous museum-quality shows featuring the likes of Rembrandt, Turner, and Constable. The art world is currently holding its breath over the latest developments at the gallery. A rash of lawsuits brought against the gallery has resulted in the indefinite postponement of what was to have been its most spectacular project yet: two exhibitions of master artworks organized in association with Whitfield... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/long-arc-of-an-acclaimed-master/63474/ Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Like Monet, de Kooning (1904–1997) lived one of art's great careers: a long arc that stretched from early years as a revolutionary, to mid-years as an acclaimed master, and on to a long late period of relative critical neglect as the avant-garde chugged past. As was also the case with Monet, de Kooning's late work has gained renewed interest after his death. Two museum-quality exhibitions focus on the last great flowering of de Kooning's painting in the 1980s. Circumstances changed greatly for... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/macabre-in-every-medium/63069/ Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST In Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Triumph of Death" (c. 1562), hordes of skeletons swarm upon a town, pitilessly inflicting lessons about the transitoriness of life and its diversions. Popular depictions of death have evolved in the centuries since, but death's grip on our imaginations has hardly lessened. In "I Am as You Will Be: The Skeleton in Art," more than 30 artists, from James Ensor to Andy Warhol and Donald Baechler, arrange bones in almost every possible configuration and medium as they... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/full-tilt-figuration/62547/ Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Over-the-top, in-your-face, cartoon-inspired art has an enduring niche in today's scene, and now it has a new nomenclature. According to the literature accompanying Deitch Projects' "Mail Order Monsters," this group exhibition is an exploration of "freaked-up figuration" (or, more precisely, an unprintable version of this phrase.) The hallmark of this figuration — we'll call it F.U.F. for short — isn't subnormal drawing and painting skills, nor decrepit artists' materials, but a predilection... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/emphasizing-composition/62037/ Thu, 6 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Contemporary art, when it touches at all upon artistic traditions, often resorts to a kind of commentary, exploring contexts rather than original spirit. The survey of drawings by Charles Cajori at David Findlay, however, refreshingly avoids such pitfalls. A lifetime of drawing the human figure has clearly put this second-generation Abstract Expressionist in touch with his own humanness. In 40 works spanning nearly half a century, Mr. Cajori's resolve and insights express themselves in the most... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/triple-take-on-the-hudson-river/61116/ Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Vassar College has always been home to an exceptionally fine collection of Hudson River School paintings. The intimate exhibition currently at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center combines nearly 20 of these works with paintings and drawings loaned from two other collections. Together, the 50 small to medium-size pieces show off the strengths of a uniquely American movement, and its wonderfully unself-conscious pursuit of the dramas of nature — its spaces, textures, and especially its suffusing... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-brief-2007-08-23/61152/ Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST 1950S–1960S KINETIC ABSTRACTION Andrea Rosen Gallery Founded in Dusseldorf in 1957, the Zero Group became one of the first international art movements of the postwar era, with adherents in several countries across Western Europe. Reacting to the histrionics of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, the artists of Zero explored phenomena of motion and light with casual, nontraditional materials. As it happened, it was also the first movement to capture the attention of the prominent German... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/casting-off-the-parisians/61097/ Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Every summer, Hollis Taggart serves up a rotating exhibition of its latest acquisitions of American Modernist art. (Individual works are liable to be sold and replaced by others during the course of the exhibition.) The highlights of these installations are often the surprises: the eye-catching works of unfamiliar artists, or atypical pieces by well-known ones. Currently, a number of intriguing pieces are on view, most of them interwar paintings that show American artists struggling to cast off... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/bold-tireless-abstractionist/60179/ Thu, 9 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST From Pollock's free-form loops to Kline's slashes and Rothko's vibrant, pooling hues, Abstract Expressionism was a remarkably diverse movement. All of its attacks shared, however, one essential trait: A rawness of means, expressed as uncompromising gestures or primal, irreducible forms and colors. Two related exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum tell the intriguing story of the lesser-known gestural abstractionist Cleve Gray (1918–2004). Although sympathetic to the Abstract Expressionists, he... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/sweet-seduction-in-varied-forms/59659/ Thu, 2 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST In its original incarnation as a 1965 rock song, The Strangeloves' "I Want Candy" was a thinly disguised celebration of teenage lust. The Hudson River Museum's intriguing exhibition of the same name explores far subtler signs of desire, vulnerability, and exploitation. Sensuousness abounds in the images of candy and desserts by more than 40 contemporary artists, but so does a kind of sophisticated restraint; the sultry curls of icing touch only obliquely, if at all, on the hot-button issues of... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/living-up-to-expectations/59239/ Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Every painter inspired by masters feels daunted by their example. But if your own great-great-grandfather was such a luminary, the stakes are even hgher. To his credit, John C.P. Constable (1928–2002) attempted neither to duplicate nor ironically recast his ancestor's remarkable achievement. The more than 20 of his landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings currently at Salander-O'Reilly demonstrate the solid, and occasionally sparkling, efforts of a painter willingly submitting to the... JOHN GOODRICH http://www.nysun.com/arts/traditions-their-uses/58296/ Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Zwirner and Wirth's "Old School" explores a tantalizing mega-generational gap: the divide between 16th- and 17th-century paintings and their postmodernist counterparts. Nearly 30 landscapes, still lifes, and figure paintings by old masters and contemporary artists make for a fascinating mix, telling us a little about traditions of art and a great deal about current uses for them. The paintings have been paired according to theme and style, on walls painted a rich shade of red. A 1630 panel of a...