Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:10:09 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Maureen Mullarkey :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Maureen+Mullarkey istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/those-who-can-teach/86545/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST 'A teacher affects eternity," Henry Adams once said. "He can never tell where his influence stops." It might not stop at all if his influence has substance and his students are great enough. Francis M. Naumann's inaugural exhibition — in new, expanded quarters in Midtown — is a testament to Man Ray's influence on modern photography. It pays special tribute to his formative influence on his most distinguished studio assistant, Berenice Abbott, who, in turn, taught Naomi Savage at the New School... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-little-elephant-that-could-drawing-babar/86075/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The miraculous moment when line and color quicken into art occurs as gladly in children's picture books as in medieval Psalters. A Francophone elephant in a green suit belongs to the natural history of make-believe no less than the griffins and unicorns of ancient bestiaries or manuscript marginalia. So, the Morgan Library is a fitting repository for the surviving drafts of text and illustrations for the creation of Babar, the paterfamilias of a classic modern bedtime story. "Drawing Babar... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/small-but-sumptuous-the-watercolors-of-romare/85589/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Color is indispensable for realizing pictorial space in all its variety; it is key to Romare Bearden's watercolors. "City Lights" assembles 18 radiant Manhattan views, almost all painted between 1979 and 1980. Many are from a series of cityscapes commissioned for the opening credits of John Cassavetes's 1980 film "Gloria." Born in Charlotte, N.C., Bearden (1911-88) grew up in Harlem at the zenith of the Harlem Renaissance. His parents were prominent figures among Harlem's creative aristocracy... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/charles-mattons-magical-imagination/84833/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Charles Matton is a conceptual artist with the soul of a charm-struck miniaturist. He draws from the early European tradition of handmade cabinet houses and the trompe-l'oeil illusions inside 17th-century Dutch perspective boxes. His interiors, real and imagined, elude contemporary categories. Magical, detailed maquettes suggest a child's love of all things Lilliputian, precise, and make-believe. Born in 1933, Mr. Matton exhibited in his native Paris in the early 1960s before turning to... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/music-and-folk-art-shine-in-kandinskys-munich/83879/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was the beckoning priest of an aestheticized, secular spirituality that has become the fallback position for agnostics with a yen for transcendence. A display from the Guggenheim's permanent collection showcases Kandinsky's early work produced in Munich between 1903 and 1911, the year he published "Concerning the Spiritual in Art." Kandinsky came to painting late. Born into a wealthy, aristocratic Russian family, he began his studies in law at the University of... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/lynette-wallworth-and-the-art-of-life/83324/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST To hear director Peter Sellars tell it, video artist Lynette Wallworth is the one we have been waiting for. Better yet, she is the one Mozart was waiting for. All those sparkling operatic heroines — from Illia in "Idomeneo" to "The Magic Flute" and a steely Queen of the Night — were mere rehearsals for one strong female voice of wisdom and enlightenment. At last she is among us, on the Lincoln Center campus, with an installation that "is one of the most moving works of art of our lifetime." Ms... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-feast-of-loathings-tetsumi-kudo/82923/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Ogden Nash never saw the sculpture of Tetsumi Kudo (1935-90), never read his pensιes. Even so, he would have known how to approach this installation at Andrea Rosen Gallery. Nash appreciated the justice of malice toward some: "Any kiddie in school can love like a fool, / But hating, my boy, is an art." Organized and curated by collector Joshua Mack, this exhibition is a feast of loathings. There is the unlovely work itself plus the artist's antirational epistemology that earns it the tag... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-ring-of-truth-max-beckmann-self-portrait-with/82501/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Without exaggeration, Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was the greatest German painter of the 20th century. He was a painter's painter, broader in range and more complex than his contemporaries. And he sustained his productivity at the highest possible level longer than others. "Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait With Horn," opening today at the Neue Galerie, is a splendid opportunity to view his painting and graphic work in context with the three Weimar artists who are best seen in relation to him: Otto Dix... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/testing-the-urban-topography/80275/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Jane Jacobs called the city the "immense laboratory of trial and error." It is a site for experimentation and exploration for painters no less than city planners, architects, and designers. "Urban Landscapes," the summer group exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, showcases urban topography by eight painters. It is one of the season's most satisfying shows and one of the gallery's best ensembles. Rackstraw Downes is represented by two finely wrought studies that date back a decade or more and... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/paolo-stacciolis-pride-of-place/80004/ Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:49:09 EST It is no surprise that the work of Florentine ceramicist and sculptor Paolo Staccioli, now on view at the Italian Cultural Institute, should be admired in China and Japan. Both countries share with Italy a high regard for the culture of ceramics. China's ancient cultural center, Xi'an City, has just honored Mr. Staccioli with an exhibit in the antiquities museum that holds the renowned "Terracotta Army," buried with the first emperor of China two millennia ago. Born in 1943, the artist began... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-colorless-look-at-rockwells-romantic-realism/78808/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Disdain for Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) is obligatory and safe. It puts at risk nothing that public culture has not already discarded: regard for the simple decencies and small pleasures of ordinary people, unembarrassed patriotism, piety — civic no less than religious — and shared trust in the valued status of family life. With generosity toward the commonplace, Rockwell's renowned covers for the Saturday Evening Post affirmed what modernism rejected. For that, he is yet to be forgiven. A tiny... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/shimmer-and-shadow-caught-in-space/76840/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Jordan Wolfson is a talented painter who works primarily within the tradition of studio still lifes and interiors. Many canvases include a figure, often a female nude; others concentrate less on the objects in a room than on the spaces between them. His work is infused with a granular light that erodes edges, endowing each form with an atmospheric shimmer. The way light fills and enlivens empty space is his most consistent theme. A Southern California native, Mr. Wolfson lived and worked in... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/treasure-trove/76466/ Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 EST "Reclaimed" is a historic exhibition that celebrates the partial recovery of artworks confiscated by the Nazis from Jacques Goudstikker, the pre-eminent Amsterdam art dealer in the 1920s and '30s. The show, which is now at the Bruce Museum and will travel to the Jewish Museum in 2009, also provides a frame for understanding both the intricacies of locating scattered items and the legal battles involved in restitution. Equally significant, this representative sample of a spectacular collection... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/ventrone-sheds-a-whole-new-light-on-natures-bounty/76087/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Born in Rome in 1942, Luciano Ventrone is a celebrated Italian photo-realist with a distinguished exhibition history centered in Rome, Milan, and Bologna. This is his first solo show in New York. Mr. Ventrone came of age in tandem with Richard Estes, Robert Cottingham, Chuck Close, and other first-generation photo-realists, but he takes a very different turn from his American counterparts, using the techniques of the genre to bypass mundane contemporary items and quotidian scenes. He anchors... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/following-the-family-trade/76086/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST For Marc de Montebello, art is the family business. His father, Philippe, has been the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three decades (he recently announced his retirement). In 1991, the younger Mr. de Montebello opened his own gallery, which specialized in 19th- and early-20th-century works, on East 84th Street, down the block from his father's office. He closed the gallery in 2000 to concentrate on his own painting. Mr. de Montebello's grandfather, a scientist and painter... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/john-dubrows-handsome-urban-motifs/75221/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Since his first New York exhibition in 1985, John Dubrow has created some of the finest paintings of his generation. The commanding suite of aerial cityscapes born of his 1997-98 residency in the World Trade Center towers comes straight to mind. So do his views of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and sun-drenched roofscapes of New York. Certain portraits from the beginning of the decade — Frederick Wiseman among his film cans; the model Josie — are memorable works of art that surpass the fugitive occasion... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/simple-beauty/74821/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "Here's the Thing" is a testament to the ingenuity of homo faber and the goodness of man-made things. The show, now at the Katonah Museum of Art, is the brainchild of painter Robert Cottingham. He planned and curated this exhibition of more than 60 paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings that range from the late 19th century to the present. It is an urbane and delightful apologia for his own creative initiative. Mr. Cottingham is a celebrated first-generation photo-realist, and has been... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/capturing-a-scene-minus-the-camera/74460/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST The pleasure of cityscapes goes back to antiquity. Even in his country house, the Roman owner of the villa at Boscoreale, painted around 40–30 B.C.E., included frescoes with trompe l'oeil architectural details of a spatially ambiguous but distinctly urban setting, a reference to what contemporary artist Ben Aronson calls "a city's urban current." Mr. Aronson's second exhibition of cityscapes at Tibor de Nagy is a lively blend of architectural and pedestrian scenes of New York, San Francisco... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/so-shocking-so-stale/73294/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Seeking to expand its own contemporary holdings, Vassar College is wooing the Logan Collection, one of the world's largest stockpiles of contemporary art. "Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection," now at Vassar's Loeb Art Center, showcases 34 works on paper by 27 contemporary artists from the collection of Kent Logan, a retired partner at Montgomery Securities, and his wife Vicki, a 1968 Vassar alumna. The couple began collecting contemporary art... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/lumberjack-sculptor/72863/ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST John Anderson began as a logger in Seattle. When heavy snow halted logging in winter, he went to art school during the hiatus. Discharged from the army after the Korean War, he studied full time on the GI Bill. Even then, he went back to logging in the summer. His recent sculpture has the spirit of a lumberjack's tall tale: monumental, heroic, yet with mythic whimsy at its heart. If Paul Bunyan took to the woods with a buzz saw and carpenter's tools, he would come up with something similar: not... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/rain-forest-couture/72384/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Take an airbrushed mythic past, add the exotic cravings of contemporary aestheticism, and you have the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru," a museum display that reaches into the heart of darkness, only to come up with "luxury items from ancient Peru." The show exhibits more than 70 specimens of an art developed over more than 2,000 years among Andean peoples. Several works date to the threshold of the common era. Most were made between the... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/unearthing-a-bookworms-work/72040/ Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Information is a tool, but love of reading is a way of life. And like any love, it has a physical dimension. There is more to it than simply ingesting print. It begins with pleasure in the look, feel, and weight of a book. Some would argue that in our digital age, book arts matter more than ever before. Nowhere do they matter more than at the Grolier Club, founded in 1884 to promote the art of book production. Modern bookbinding techniques were perfected to a fine art toward the end of the 19th... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/evaporated-images/71994/ Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Diana Horowitz is a deeply appealing painter. She works within the tradition of open-air painting dear to artists from between the 17th and 19th centuries. Making gracious use of her antecedents, she balances the improvisational appeal of plein air against the demands of unromantic modern construction. This, her second exhibition at Hirschl & Adler, is a medley of 20 or so cityscapes of New York and several pastorales of Truro. Ms. Horowitz's industrial sites along Brooklyn's commercial... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-york-two-times/71297/ Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Rudy Burckhardt (1914–1999) and Yvonne Jacquette (b. 1934) were a creative team from their first meeting in 1961 through their marriage, which lasted until Burckhardt's suicide at 85. Though the work of both has been much exhibited and commented on over the last 50 years, this is the first time their work has been shown in tandem. The Museum of the City of New York presents concurrent exhibitions of the New York paintings and pastels of Ms. Jacquette and the urban photographs of her late... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/finnish-arts-ipo/70905/ Thu, 7 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST "Ars Fennica," now at Scandinavia House, is Finland's answer to Britain's Turner Prize, considered the most prestigious contemporary visual arts award. It is bestowed annually by the Ars Fennica Foundation, established in 1990 by entrepreneur Pertti Niemistφ and his wife Henna. The couple were double-barreled collectors of contemporary art and lavish promoters. (Pertti died in 1999, Henna in 2004.) Despite squeaks and whistles about "encouraging artists in their creativity," the prize was... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/painting-the-social-landscape/70501/ Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was committed to creating art that transcended social issues, and she believed that, by 1970, African-Americans had already made the necessary political assertions to do so. "Now it's time that they get down to work and produce art they can really be proud of," she stated. The "African American Art: 200 Years" exhibition at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is a tribute to the number of African-American artists who have done just that over the span of 200 years. On view are 41... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/attention-to-detail/70523/ Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST It is not often that one can enjoy a figure drawing by Baccio Bandinelli in the company of one by his pupil and biographer, Giorgio Vasari. But this is only one of the pleasures of this stately presentation, Old Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, at W.M. Brady & Co. The exhibition extends between the 16th and 19th centuries, with satisfying emphasis on the Italian and French schools. Bandinelli's fame was widespread in his lifetime for draftsmanship and command of anatomy. The tightly... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/play-stations/69672/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The element of play in art-making is often undervalued. Older than culture, play is filled with significant ritual and meaningful gestures — components associated with art. Watching squirrels race or puppies in mock battle is a good introduction to the primordial quality of play. And the double exhibition currently on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery is a rambunctious lesson in the art of it. A suite of collages and assemblages by Robert Warner is felicitously paired with Mac Premo's "my systems... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/american-stories-masterfully-told/68866/ Thu, 3 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST In the National Archives is a 1944 photo of two uniformed men standing in front of a large painting. The caption reads: "Sgt. Romare Bearden, noted young Negro artist ... is shown discussing one of his paintings, 'Cotton Workers,' with Pvt. Charles H. Alston, his first art teacher and cousin. ... Both Bearden and Alston are members of the 372nd Infantry, a segregated regiment stationed in New York City." The greatness of the generation who came of age during World War II was apparent in the... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/saving-face/68630/ Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Universal across time and civilizations, masks are among man's oldest forms of expression. Anthropologists tell us they exist in every society; psychoanalysts insist we all wear them. They serve an infinity of purposes, and their primal fascination remains as compelling to moderns as to aboriginal peoples. "MASK" at James Cohan Gallery comprises a collection of some 40 historic and ethnographic masks, dating from 700 B.C.E. through the 20th century. Assembled by Joseph G. Gerena Fine Art, a... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/against-abstraction/67972/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Stuart Davis disliked the words "abstract" and "abstraction." He battled against the tendency to divide representational painting from "so-called abstractions." They are identical, he insisted, because both represent an illusion of the three-dimensional space we inhabit. His refusal to separate art into camps originated in his devotion to drawing, to a linear conception of form, and to Cezanne's insistence on the unity of painting and drawing. "Dynamic Impulse: The Drawings of Stuart Davis," at... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/glass-half-full/67627/ Thu, 6 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Where is glass going as a fine art medium? "Shattering Glass: New Perspectives" at the Katonah Museum answers that question with a site-specific, installation-based exhibition of contemporary glass works by 22 artists. In an introduction to the show, the curator for the Corning Museum of Glass, Tina Oldknow, notes that questions about the direction of art glass have been in the air since the beginning of the studio glass movement in the 1960s. But such a remark is akin to poet Philip Larkin's... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/watercolors-with-a-dose-of-whimsy/66523/ Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST "Thank heaven for art that has nothing to prove!" the poetry editor of the New Yorker for many years and a poet herself, Louise Bogan, once said. I cannot look at Elizabeth O'Reilly's lyrical celebrations of unexceptional sites without thinking of Ms. Bogan, who understood that art can fulfill its purposes on the aesthetic plane alone. Ms. O'Reilly's current exhibition at George Billis Gallery displays a generous selection of those freely brushed plein air landscapes for which she is known. But... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/everyday-enchantment/66074/ Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST At 87, Wayne Thiebaud paints with as much verve, wit, and grace as the day he appeared, unknown and unannounced, on art dealer Allan Stone's doorstep. He is an American original whose roots go deeper than Bay Area figuration and bypass Pop Art altogether. A new exhibition at Mr. Thiebaud's son's gallery, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, is his first show of recent work in New York since his longtime dealer, Stone, died last December. This exhibition is a clear demonstration of the diversity and... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/mountain-of-medieval-art/65656/ Thu, 1 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST "If the mountain will not come to Mohammed..." No, wait. That starts the wrong way around. Sam Fogg Ltd. is the mountain. And it has come to you from London's West One. Mr. Fogg is one of the world's leading dealers in medieval art. A visit to his incomparable stock ranks high on the itinerary of knowledgeable travelers. Located on the top floor of the Colnaghi building just off Bond Street, the showroom is a Dickensian cross between Westminster and the British Museum. Anyone enthralled by... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/scratch-and-sniff-sin/64387/ Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Sin is a "mildly facetious word," Thomas Mann said, and is unsuited to everyday conversation. When even the Museum of Biblical Art (MoBIA), stepchild of the American Bible Society, tiptoes around the word, the triumph of nonjudgmentalism is irreversible. MoBIA's "The Art of Forgiveness: Images of the Prodigal Son" combines distinguished art with didactic commentary caught between two antagonistic goals: populist outreach to ordinary people and an aesthetic appeal to secular cognoscenti. The... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/life-in-the-slow-lane-parking-lot/64389/ Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST In 1837, painter Washington Allston wrote of the work of William Sidney Mount to a friend. "He has a firm, decided pencil, and seems to have a good notion of the figure," Allston said. "If he would study Ostade and Jan Steen, especially the latter, and master their color and chiaroscuro, there is nothing ... to prevent his becoming a great artist in the line he has chosen." Mount was a history painter who, sensitive to the antiheroic temper of the time, turned to genre scenes of everyday life... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/great-heights-of-lowly-merriment/63968/ Thu, 4 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST 'Even lowly merriment has its ultimate origin in holiness," wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel. They may not have known it at the time, but many New Yorkers had their first hint of Torah joy on the Coney Island carousel. Until now, historical and aesthetic links between the synagogue and the carousel have not been documented. But "Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel" at the American Folk Museum establishes the record. Jewish folk traditions and the skills formed within... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/best-friend-turned-backdrop/62545/ Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Man and dog are a partnership made in heaven. Who doubts that seraphim keep spaniels or cherubim guard Eden with hounds and retrievers? William Wegman's genius in exploiting canine responsiveness to social cues is one of the sweetest pleasures of contemporary photography. The artist once complained that he was "nailed to the dog cross." That is just where we want him. "Wegman Outdoors," a survey of photographs taken between 1981 and 2007, combines classic Wegman images with new work that... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-paris-freedom-from-pressure/60164/ Thu, 9 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Paris's image as the cultural capital of the Western world lingered after its substance had fled. Looking back on the 1950s, Clement Greenberg told Al Held, "Paris was not the place to be at that time, but you young fellows created the Paris you thought was there." Americans cannot get enough of that fabricated Paris. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron danced their way through it to Gershwin's "An American in Paris" suite in 1951. Underwritten by the relative affluence and confidence of postwar... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/finding-beauty-in-botany/59717/ Thu, 2 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Prick hundreds of contemporary paintings and the air goes out of them. Prick a fine botanical and it bleeds. Its lifeblood flows from an obligation to be both true and beautiful, a transcendent unit. This dual nature of botanical art — scientific in purpose, aesthetic in conception and execution — is on stunning display in the gallery of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden. "Paradise in Print" showcases 500 years of Caribbean history and culture through beautifully... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/forgotten-figure/59200/ Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST If you are looking for an excuse for a themed travel package to Atlanta, here it is. "Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter," at the High Museum, is an eye-opening exhibition that, in a just world, would be scheduled for a New York run, if not launched here. The Philadelphia-born Beaux (1855–1942), internationally acclaimed in her lifetime, made her professional debut in New York in 1885. She later established a studio in New York and became a member of the National Academy. While her working... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/gallery-going-1/58753/ Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST ON BOARD Lori Bookstein Fine Art If it is summer, it must be Zeuxis. A loose association of still life painters, Zeuxis assembles several shows a year that go on the road, often to regional museums and college galleries. But every summer for the past few years, Zeuxis has been in New York. This is the group's second guest exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art. Some highly accomplished contemporary painters exhibit under the Zeuxis umbrella. Styles on view are as diverse as the 34 artists... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/to-celebrate-exalt-excite/57893/ Thu, 5 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Can art this ingratiating be taken seriously? The question dogs critical appraisal of Wolf Kahn. His popularity with a broad public and the unclouded loveliness of his landscapes give rise to grumblings that he has not earned his keep. His lyrical paintings and pastels, on view in two successive shows at Ameringer & Yohe, are so easy to like that they offend against the inherited mantle of vanguardism that marked his early career. The contemporary assumption that art of any importance does not... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/spirit-the-spiritual/56579/ Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST The premise of "It's All Spiritual," an exhibition of tribal art at Betty Cuningham Gallery, is fair enough: "All great art — to one degree or another — has a spiritual component." What counts, of course, is the character of that component and the nature of the spirit involved. Not every spirit is benevolent. To hold our page in the multicultural hymnal, we need a way around inconvenient cultural realities. Luckily, we have one in our own free-range aestheticism and that distinctly Western... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/abstract-jewels-of-modernism/56060/ Thu, 7 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Following the lead of Braque, Picasso, and Gris in the early decades of the 20th century, collage has evolved into modernism's most fertile genre. Just short of a century old, it has outlived the rhetoric of radicalism that hailed its beginnings. It endures as an undisputed gift to visual art. Pavel Zoubok's "IN CONTEXT: collage + abstraction" is an exhilarating overview of the myriad ways collage has paralleled the rise of abstraction and continued to expand pictorial means. Fifty-six modern... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/art-in-brief-2007-05-24/55180/ Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 EST MARGARET NEILL: CIRCUIT Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art Margaret Neill is an abstract painter who sets herself the rigors that many painters turn to abstraction to avoid. She works within clearly defined contours and reaches for a spatial complexity that is more often the domain of representation than of abstraction. Her first exhibition at Cheryl Pelavin is poised, accomplished, and welcome. Although Ms. Neill begins intuitively, with no prearranged sketches or plan, there is nothing accidental in the... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-the-bruce-the-art-of-deception/54196/ Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Faking it is as old as the recorded history of art. The fifth-century B.C.E. sculptor Phidias is said to have signed the work of talented students. Young Michelangelo purportedly added a false patina to a statue sold to Cardinal Riario, an astute collector of antiquities, as a genuine antique. Fast-forward to 1999, when 28 Georgia O'Keeffe watercolors were removed from the canon. The suite had previously sold for $5 million after reported endorsement by the O'Keeffe Foundation and the National... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/bound-buoyed-by-time/53733/ Thu, 3 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Czeslaw Milosz insisted: "To express the existential situation of modern man, one must live in exile of some sort." The final phrase is key. Exile is not solely a function of politics or regimes. We are all east of Eden, nomads among convictions and outcasts from our own traditions. For the artist, what matters is to recognize one's predicament and to fashion from it a cry of the heart. In his way, Joseph Cornell (1903–72), the cenobite of Utopia Parkway, was as much a witness to exile as Czech... MAUREEN MULLARKEY http://www.nysun.com/arts/division-of-labor/53284/ Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Initiated and named by Georges Seurat, Divisionism (aka Pointillism) was defined by Paul Signac: "Division is a complex system of harmony, an aesthetics rather than a technique. … The Neo-Impressionist does not dot, he divides." Dots, a wealth of them, were simply means to aesthetic ends yoked to the radical politics of the era. Interest in the new method and its formative milieu reached northern Italy in the late 1880s via French and Belgian periodicals, such as the anarchist "Les Temps...