There’s a perennially prickly relationship that persists between the artist who has an audience and the one who does not. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross returns to this theme many times as it played out between the giants of 20th century composing. Schoenberg “warned his colleagues against a futile chase after popularity,” and […]
Art World
Transgressive Women
I have been thinking a lot about transgressive women. There are so many ways to be transgressive, and I have my personal stylistic favorites. Much of my thinking has been triggered by reading a friend’s new book, Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History, by Laurel Ulrich. She has highlighted the lives of three women who […]
The Rounded Head
Francis Picabia in his studio If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts. Our heads are round so that our thinking can change directions. –Francis Picabia Picabia (1879-1953) had a life that included a number of shirt changes. He lived in Paris at a point in time […]
In Good Company
It isn’t often you get to be in a show with other artists who are both friends and talented makers. I am having that chance now with Riki Moss and Keith Maddy. The artist reception on Friday night was pure joy, and the people that came seemed particularly warm and receptive. Maybe they sensed the […]
E) All of the Above
On the topic of the current state of art education, here are a few highlights from School is Out: Rethinking Art Education Today, in Modern Painters magazine. Steven Henry Madoff: In recent years the role of the art school has moved to a position of prominence, pushed there by the encroachments of an aggressive marketplace […]
Learning Rumanian
DM, one of my favorite blogging buddies, is the voice behind the always thoughtful and provocative blog, Joe Felso:Ruminations. In a posting a few weeks back, he wrote about a book by Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. I ordered a copy without hesitating, after reading his inspiring riff […]
Matisse, Giotto and the Religious Imagination
Giotto fresco in Padua Another excerpt from Out of Eden by DiPiero. This one is from the essay, Matisse’s Broken Circle, and is particularly interesting in its reference to Matisse’s concept of the religious imagination and his emulation of Giotto. I am compelled by DiPiero’s claim that Matisse’s career was “the most sustained and variegated […]
Diebenkorn in New Mexico
If you are a Diebenkorn fan (as I am,) you will be dazzled by the new catalog for a show currently on view at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico (though September 9, 2007.) The show features work from Diebenkorn’s two and a half year residence in Albuquerque in the early 1950s, […]
Discourses and Artifacts
I’ve pulled down a few books from my library about primitive art. I am looking for some clues or insights into a personal question that has been lingering for some time: Why are non-Western, non-contextualized images increasingly compelling to me? Perhaps this can’t be parsed into logic and language–that’s a conclusion I’ve come to many […]
Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad
Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly […]