Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:04:49 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Lance Esplund :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Lance+Esplund istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-gray-area-from-a-red-revolution/85144/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST If history is indeed the great teacher — if, as I once read in a fortune cookie, "The past is the book of the future" — then what are we to make of "Art and China's Revolution," an exhibition centered on Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the Cult of Mao, and the artistic legacy of Mao's catastrophic Cultural Revolution, that opens tomorrow at the Asia Society Museum? Few shows have inspired in me such mixed feelings. On the one hand, "Art and China's Revolution," which focuses on images, objects, and... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-art-world-embraces-the-wow-factor/84768/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Recently, on a windy, early August afternoon, under an active sky that threatened autumn cool and summer storm, I saw Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson's site-specific work "The New York City Waterfalls." I took a Circle Line tour that lasts half an hour and gets you, if the wind is right, within spritzing distance. The East River loop takes you as far north as the waterfall at Manhattan's Pier 35, just above the Manhattan Bridge; past the Brooklyn Bridge's waterfall, as well as the... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-magical-from-the-mundane/86551/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Metamorphosis is as central to art as it is to myth. When an artist transforms his materials, he becomes a shaman. When an artist's materials are not transformed, he remains a charlatan — and we are left with a mere field of paint, not the "Sistine Ceiling"; a chunk of marble, not the "Pietà." With the advent of collage in the 1890s, however, metamorphosis took on new meaning. Invented by the Beggarstaffs (the British poster designers and brothers-in-law James Pryde and William Nicholson)... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/morandis-subtle-spectacle/86073/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), the subject of a long-awaited and absolutely out-of-this-world retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a painter who, especially in his small flower paintings and still lifes — façade-like clusters of crockery, tins, bowls, bottles, boxes, and vases — synthesized an array of disparate approaches, creating pictures mysterious, unique, and wholly modern. Morandi was influenced by the rich, close range of browns, creams, and grays, as... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/note-to-museumgoers-beware-spectacular-sensory/85964/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Every season, for every art lover, an exhibition or two stands out. This fall, among a long list of almost-certain-to-be-spectacular offerings at museums, the promise of two shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art really gets my heart going: "Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964" (opened yesterday, through December 14) and "Calder Jewelry" (December 9-March 1). Last fall, one of the most stunning New York gallery shows was "Simplicity of Means: Calder and the Devised Object," an exhibit of Alexander... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/landscapes-as-labors-of-love-wang-hui-at-the-met/85597/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Drawing from the art of the past is a necessary and nurturing process for an artist, a labor of love that enables him to learn his craft and to reinvent his influences. The medieval painter and theorist Cennino Cennini instructed that an artist should copy only from the best masters he can find, so that he will learn to gather "roses," not "thorns." Picasso, who could paint like Raphael, Ingres, Corot, an ancient cave painter, and an ancient Greek, advocated that an artist must not "borrow"... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-met-installation-heavy-on-provocation-light/84292/ Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the essential aspects of art is that it transcends its subject matter and culture. In an artwork it is not really important what or who is depicted — or if, as in some works of art, no thing is depicted at all. No matter what it is, where it came from, or who made it, art engages us on many levels across cultures and through millennia. One does not have to believe in Christ, or even in God, to be mystified by Duccio's "Madonna and Child" (c. 1300), a recently acquired masterwork in the... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/natural-beauty-unnatural-balance/83321/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The most profound investigation by an artist into the world of plants is Paul Klee's "The Nature of Nature," the second of his posthumously published two-volume Bauhaus teaching notebooks. Klee's notebooks, the first of which is "The Thinking Eye," are no substitute for his art. They do, however, provide entrance into the metaphors, processes, and structures of abstract painting. In "The Nature of Nature," Klee, a cosmologist as much as a botanist, analyzes the world not to describe nature but... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/evening-in-berlin/82977/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The Museum of Modern Art's extensive, world-class collection, not to mention its lending and borrowing powers, enables it to mount small, concentrated shows devoted to subjects most museums could never dream of. A year ago, MoMA dreamed up "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at 100." This fall, the museum will bring us "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night," which will center on "The Starry Night," one of the hallmarks of MoMA's permanent collection. Van Gogh's twilight and nighttime works are a great... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/before-during-after-the-fall-durer-at-mobia/82509/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The German painter, printmaker, draftsman, graphic designer, typographer, and art theorist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was unhappily married. Erwin Panofsky, in his unsurpassed monograph on the artist, reminds us that this fact, though it may seem trivial, illuminates Dürer's importance to the Northern Renaissance. Dürer's wife, "Agnes Frey," Panofsky writes, "thought that the man she had married was a painter in the late medieval sense, an honest craftsman who produced pictures as a tailor made... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-apocalyptic-state-of-mind/82094/ Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The apocalypse and its aftermath have been a recurring theme in art for thousands of years. There is something satisfyingly narcissistic, hopeful even, in believing that our time has been chosen for the End of Days. And the New Museum's pseudo-apocalyptic exhibition "After Nature," which opens to the public today on its third floor, puts a contemporary twist on an old theme. You will not see any Last Judgment tympana, accounts of the Deluge, or Dürer's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" in this... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/click-bean-counting-in-brooklyn/81567/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST In his book "The Wisdom of Crowds," James Surowiecki, the New Yorker magazine's business columnist, relates a story about the British scientist Francis Galton. In 1906, Galton attended a county fair, where he participated in a weight-judging competition of a fat ox. Galton believed that, among the 800 participants, the livestock experts at the fair would generally guess the animal's weight correctly and the amateurs would be way off the mark. When Galton did a statistical test on the... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/nature-painted-with-force/81221/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST When Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) paints wind, steam, mist, surf, smoke, cloud, and fire — when he really hits it, as he does frequently after 1830 — it's as if the heavens have opened up and the artist, equal mixtures of Apollo and Dionysus, were a romantic messenger from the gods, a bringer of light. Throughout his long and successful career, Turner painted numerous subjects, including mythological, historical, and religious scenes, land and sea battles, and landscapes and... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-life-trumps-art-the-sculpture-of-louise/80706/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The art of the past is accessible, but Modern and contemporary art are difficult and obtuse, even confrontational — or so the myth goes. Recent art, that myth contends, is personal and subjective (whatever you want it to be), as opposed to universal, and abstraction has no subject and, therefore, no content. But that same myth suggests also that to be successfully brought to the masses, the art of the last 100 years must appeal to our insatiable thirst for entertainment and to our increasingly... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/paradise-on-earth-at-the-rubin-museum/80274/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Threats of punishment and promises of reward inspire a lot of spiritual quests. Unless you are a true masochist, pessimist, or martyr, however, imagining enlightenment, resurrection, and redemption is probably preferable to thoughts of suffering and damnation. Most of us prefer a massage to a hair shirt; hope to fear; picturing walking into the light, rather than into the fire. That is probably why, although most cultures have visions of heaven, fewer have visions of hell. It is blissful... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-century-of-the-world-distilled/79338/ Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The Metropolitan Museum of Art is not headlining its luminous exhibition "Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940." There was no press preview or publication for the show, and no banner for the exhibit graces the Met's façade. But the enchanting gathering of more than 150 prints — 10 to 12 iconic works by each of 13 key photographers — a whirlwind tour of the medium's first 100 years, is sure to be one of the Met's sleeper hits of the summer. The public's ongoing love affair and... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/natures-ecstasy-joan-mitchell-on-paper-and-canvas/78824/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Spring and summer provide us with some of the headiest and most ephemeral experiences in the garden. While describing the suddenness and intensity with which our Yoshino cherry tree blossomed a full, feathery white and then, like snowfall, shed its petals in the afternoon breeze, a friend reminded me of Bonnard's paintings of flowering trees, suggesting that in Bonnard, no less so than in spring's fleeting blossoms, we are witnessing "nature's ecstasy." The phrase "nature's ecstasy" came to... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/guilty-pleasures-of-plundered-treasures/76852/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In an excellent catalog essay for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exquisite, concentrated show "Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria and Albert Museum," the V&A's Paul Williamson informs us that "[e]very medieval or Renaissance work of art has a story to tell." For most antiquities, however, their stories — whether through plunder, dislocation, recycling, or destruction by invaders or iconoclasts — involve eventual ruin. The very few artworks from antiquity that have survived... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/dali-dada-diy/76751/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Salvador Dalí (1904-89), more performer and personality than artist, is well-known for his flamboyantly flimsy, metaphysical Surrealist paintings. The art critic Jed Perl succinctly summed him up as "the Liberace of modern art." But Dalí was also a designer of textiles, perfume bottles, cognac labels, stamps, magazine advertisements, airline ashtrays, and Hallmark greeting cards — not all of them sleazy or half-bad. And he performed in television commercials. In his book "The Dalí Renaissance,"... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/goya-at-the-top-of-his-game/76472/ Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In late 1807 and early 1808, French troops began to occupy areas of northern Spain, beginning an international six-year war, in which Spanish guerrillas, as well as civilians, including women and children, defended their homeland, village by village, house by house, and even floor by floor. During forced coexistence, husbands and sons were tortured and murdered and women and girls were raped and forced to marry French officers and employees. The press was censored. The Spanish Inquisition's... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/americas-artistic-triumph/76078/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Americans seem to thrive on rivalry. And we like winners and winning. We also want to be heard. During the 1940s and '50s, when the avant-garde artists of New York supplanted those of Europe, Abstract Expressionism and the New York School were celebrated as having literally "triumphed" over the School of Paris. American "Action Painting" and its mural scale, it was believed, had displaced the European easel picture and its centuries-old view of painting as a window on the world. America... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/philip-guston-at-the-morgan-library-and-museum/75658/ Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The Janus-headed career of Philip Guston continues to baffle and to engender both supporters and detractors. And people tend to prefer one head to the other. Standing in the first room of the Morgan Library & Museum's beautiful though uneven show of Guston's works on paper, Isabelle Dervaux, who organized the exhibition at the Morgan (its only American venue), asked me which Guston I preferred. When I told her I liked 1950s Guston much more than late Guston, she jokingly suggested that I skip... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/shadow-play-2008-04-10/74474/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Now that the new New Museum of Contemporary Art's inaugural group exhibition of installations and collage, "Unmonumental" — its coming-out party — is over, the institution is getting down to the business of solo shows. The first major exhibition of abstract paintings by London-based artist Tomma Abts (b. Kiel, Germany, 1967) takes up the museum's third floor; and the first extensive exhibition in America of New York artist Paul Chan (and the premiere in this country of Mr. Chan's complete... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/popping-up-in-brooklyn/74101/ Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "Plastics." Walking through the Brooklyn Museum's two-floor, two-giftshop retrospective of contemporary Japanese artist/entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, I couldn't shake that quintessential bit of dialogue from "The Graduate": "Ben — I just want to say one word to you — just one word. … Plastics." In "The Graduate," the grave and prophetic "Plastics" refers to the future of business, not art — but who knew, during the late 1960s, that the then newly formed Pop art temple of Warhol, Johns... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/woodblock-family-tree/73704/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Two exceptional and extremely complementary shows of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, paintings, and illustrated books are currently available in New York. Together, they offer a phenomenal and thorough overview — a gathering of nearly 250 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century works by master painters and printers such as Moronobu, Toyoharu, Utamaro, Hokusai, Kunisada, Hiroshige, and Kuniyoshi. "Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680–1860," co-organized by the... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-on-the-horizon/73171/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Before you set your sights on the future, don't let the present pass you by. The Metropolitan Museum of Art currently gives us plenty of reasons to forego those spring walks through the park and, instead, to take in nature of a different kind. "Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," which closes May 11, and "Gustave Courbet," which closes May 18, both offer some of the most spectacular collections of landscape paintings available in New York. Later this spring, in what will surely be an... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/whirling-dervishes-of-design/72829/ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The first half of the exhibition "Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730–2008," which just opened at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, is absolutely stunning. No matter how austere your aesthetic sensibilities, "Rococo" has enough fine-tuned dreamy opulence and pizzazz to make even the most ascetic among us swoon and grow a little wobbly in the knees. The show, organized by the Cooper-Hewitt's Sarah Coffin, Gail Davidson, and Ellen Lupton, and guest curator Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, is... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/frida-kahlos-fever-dreams/72389/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:33:58 EST PHILADELPHIA — For contemporary audiences long familiar with Surrealism, Expressionism, confessional-, folk-, and Outsider-art, the self-portraits of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, which embrace all of these approaches, may be among some of the most compelling and accessible figure paintings made during the 20th century. I certainly was aware of the wide appeal of Kahlo's work as I slowly maneuvered through the wall-to-wall crowds in the absorbing Kahlo retrospective, which opened recently at... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/sacred-from-the-profane/72022/ Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST There should be a temporary exit, perhaps a waiting room or a café, just off the galleries, midway through the Gustave Courbet retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, momentarily free from the powers of Courbet's paintings, viewers could sit down, catch their breath, fan themselves, and gather the strength to give themselves over to the last half of the exhibition. The show, which begins with an astonishing grouping of self-portraits, is organized roughly by theme. Midway... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-social-realism/71613/ Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST We keep hearing that the Chinese, rebuilding China from the ground up, with an infrastructure based on the success of Western models, are increasingly outdoing the West on nearly every front — economic, technological, and educational. And we also keep hearing that, although the 20th century belonged to America, the 21st century will almost certainly belong to Asia — probably China. A new exhibition at the Guggenheim, the retrospective of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (pronounced tsai gwo chang)... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/poussins-natural-selection/71333/ Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST There are few, if any, superlatives that would overstate the astounding achievement — the lyric poetry, the rigorous classicism, the emotional richness, the refined magic — of the paintings of Nicolas Poussin. And there are few superlatives that would overstate the impact of "Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," a profound exhibition of more than 100 landscape paintings and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For anyone who loves painting, this show, pitch-perfect from beginning to... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/shades-of-gray-2008-02-07/70867/ Thu, 7 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST "Without question, Jasper Johns is one of the greatest artists of our era." This statement, written in the catalog foreward for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's show "Jasper Johns: Gray," comes directly from the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, and was written jointly with James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show originated. This is no faint praise indeed. And the Metropolitan Museum has not taken Mr. de Montebello's claim lightly. "Jasper Johns: Gray," a... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/gods-monsters/70543/ Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The second gallery of the China Institute's small, captivating two-room exhibition, "Enchanted Stories: Chinese Shadow Theater in Shaanxi," begins with images of hell, reincarnation, and damnation. Intricately carved and assembled figures, animals, demons, gods, buildings, and landscapes line the gallery walls. These beautiful shadow puppets, made out of rawhide burnished to a translucent, golden patina and painted with black, red, and green, are graceful and animated even in their arrested... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-blood-at-the-frick/70368/ Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The Frick Collection rarely shakes things up in its permanent galleries. Certain works, such as the paintings in the Fragonard Room, are part of the architecture. The museum's charter forbids it to make loans, and the Frick's curators seldom shuffle objects from gallery to gallery, so you can count on your favorite artworks — Bellini's "St. Francis," Vermeer's "Mistress and Maid," Duccio's "Temptation," or Ingres's "Comtesse," for instance — always to be there when you need them. The Frick's... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/built-to-please/70107/ Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The first blockbuster of the season, "Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi," opens tomorrow at the Morgan Library & Museum. Conceived by the former director of the Uffizi, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, and curated by the Morgan's Rhoda Eitel-Porter, it comprises nearly 80 16th-century Italian drawings, many of them by artists at the top of their game. Though specialized — and, as with most of the Morgan's offerings, mild-mannered and midsize in scale — it is an... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/close-encounters-but-not-close-enough/69698/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Can portraiture be iconic without being illuminating? Can photography conceal as much as it discloses? Can style overpower substance? And can celebrity hold our attention long after an image falters? The answer to these questions, which is yes, can be found over and over again in "Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers," a beautifully installed exhibition of 67 portrait photographs that opens tomorrow at the Morgan Library & Museum. The innovative and accomplished... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/japanese-renaissance-in-industrial-design/69284/ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST In a world inundated with Japanimation, the slick, plastic, comic book-inspired artworks of Takashi Murakami, and the latest in technological Japanese wares, it is difficult to accept that traditional Japanese aesthetics once favored shadow and darkness over a well-lighted place; softness and diffusion over clear, hard edges; reticence and emptiness over noise and clutter, the mellowness of age over the sparkle of the new. When cultures collide, however, cultures change. Japan's collision with... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/mets-memorable-year/68843/ Thu, 3 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Any discussion of the best New York art exhibitions of the past year must begin and end with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not only did the Met mount some of 2007's most memorable shows (some of which are still running), the museum also, through a series of renovations, reinstallations, and expansions, took the greatest museum in America and made it even better. And the Met performed these feats of legerdemain seamlessly, without too much fanfare, and without changing its footprint. Even more... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/bons-the-word/68404/ Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST A Mondrian abstraction, an ancient Greek sculpture of a youth, or a Corot landscape can be as spiritually uplifting as a Buddha or a crucifix: In art, it is not what the subject brings to the artwork, but rather what the artist brings to his subject. But settings matter. And few places in New York offer the kind of spiritual oasis available at the Rubin Museum of Art, where "Bon: The Magic Word," an enchanting exhibition and the first major show devoted to the art and culture of the Bon... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/museum-exhibit-focuses-on-freud/67982/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Artists copy, or draw, paint, and sculpt from other artists' work, so they can learn their craft. You can learn a lot about an artist through what he chooses to copy. And you can learn even more about him by comparing the copy to the original — an act that can help you to gain insight into both artists simultaneously. That act of comparison is particularly telling in "Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings," an exhibition of 68 etchings, 21 paintings, and five drawings that opens Sunday at the... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-museum-madness/67296/ Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST During yesterday morning's press preview for the opening of the new New Museum, which opens to the public tomorrow on Bowery, at Prince Street, the sky was overcast. On my approach east on Prince, the museum, shimmering gray, a shade or two darker than the sky, materialized as if it were a mirage. The seven-story-tall structure, rising 174 feet above street level, is a series of six stacked, silvery boxes of various sizes, some of which step back from the street or jut slightly north or south... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/word-games/67238/ Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Midway through the Whitney's 120-work, 40-year retrospective, "Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See," I saw an unsuspecting viewer being reprimanded by a guard. He had just stepped on Mr. Weiner's "One Pint Gloss White Lacquer Poured Directly Upon the Floor and Allowed to Dry." Conceived in 1968, but executed, once again, recently at the Whitney, the sculpture is exactly what its title suggests. The museum guard, whose command of the English language was not perfect, shouted, "No step! No... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/elegy-for-a-gallery/67231/ Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The greatest gallery in New York has shut its doors, probably forever. On October 16, in the face of multiple lawsuits filed against the gallery's principal, Lawrence Salander, by banks, dealers, collectors, business partners, an auction house, artists, and artists' heirs, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries closed up shop. A judge ordered its locks changed, and the gallery declared bankruptcy. These are all signs that do not bode well for its recovery. The loss of Salander-O'Reilly signals not the end... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/california-dreaming-2007-11-15/66486/ Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Experimental film artist Jeremy Blake left his clothes, wallet, and a note on a Rockaway beach and walked alone into the surf at dusk on July 17. His body was found five days later in the waters off Sea Girt, N.J. Blake, who was born in 1971 in Fort Sill, Okla., committed suicide one week after the suicide of his longtime companion, the writer and filmmaker Theresa Duncan. When he did so, we lost much more than a talented voice: We lost a visionary who gave us an inimitable, looking-glass view... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/formal-fantasy/66103/ Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The American sculptor Martin Puryear, the subject of a 30-year retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, makes spare, sometimes elegant objects that are ambitiously constructed yet formally glib. Mr. Puryear (b. 1941) borrows from the traditions of African, minimalist, and modernist sculpture, and from woodworking, ship building, and basket weaving. He is a talented craftsman — a postmodern tinkerer, punster, and modelmaker. And his large, enigmatic, mostly wood sculptures — carved, bent... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/show-of-painterly-swagger/66095/ Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The abstract painter Thornton Willis, who was born in 1936, is a rarity in today's art world: He is a direct link between mid-20th century American painting and contemporary abstraction. Both old-world and new-, Mr. Willis has the painterly swagger of an abstract expressionist, the charm of a Southern gentleman, and the rugged good looks of an aging leading man — albeit one who spent countless hours smoking, drinking, and talking into the wee hours at the White Horse and Cedar taverns... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/heaven-sent/65683/ Thu, 1 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST If, for whatever reasons, you have been putting off a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this season, you have officially run out of rational excuses. There are great exhibitions at other venues, including the Jewish Museum's "Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City & Country," the Asia Society's "The Arts of Kashmir," and MoMA's sublime show of Seurat's drawings, but right now the Met is the New York destination spot. Currently, the museum offers extraordinary, temporary exhibitions of... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-moma-exercises-by-seurat/65275/ Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST "Georges Seurat: The Drawings," which opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is MoMA doing what it does best. The breathtaking show of more than 135 works — primarily conté drawings, along with sketchbooks and a small selection of oil sketches and easel paintings, including studies for and from his large masterpieces — presents a Modern master in unadulterated form. Few artists have conveyed the magical, otherworldly quality of the circus, the sideshow, the concert hall, and the theater as... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/tying-the-threads/64834/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST In the spring of 2002, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted the groundbreaking exhibition "Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence." That staggeringly opulent exhibit (which was, in a sense, the long-overdue sequel to the Met's 1974 show of medieval tapestries) presented an extensive survey of European tapestry production between 1460 and 1560. The show, curated by Thomas Campbell, then associate curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Met, refocused and redoubled... LANCE ESPLUND http://www.nysun.com/arts/black-white/64361/ Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Kara Walker's full-blown mid-career retrospective, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," opens today at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Organized by Philippe Vergne, deputy director and chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where the show premiered, it has also been seen at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. After its stint at the Whitney, the exhibition will travel on to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. There have been numerous New York...