Archives: Modern
Heide Fasnacht on David Diao and the Squeegee in the Expanded Field
An innovation is alive and mutable as it passes from hand to hand.
Alison Kruvant on Hedda Sterne
She saw New York as a “Surrealist” city. With its unfathomable density, extreme juxtapositions, and collective lack of sleep, the city hasn’t changed much.
Lincoln Perry on Frank Auerbach and Marino Marini
This wasn’t a decapitated head, but a self-sufficient object, as autonomous as a meteor.
Stephen Benenson on Goya and Picasso in Madrid
It was as if the life in them burned up like cellulose melting in a projector.
Norm Paris on Max Ernst
This is a portrait of a culture in the late stages of psychic rot.
Leslie Roberts on ‘Fire in the Evening’ by Paul Klee
Klee presented the grid as a flexible container for ecstatic color.
Lisa Hoke on Addie Herder
Hers are the machines that we can’t hold onto, fleeting signs of our human desire to mark which way to go.
Suzanne Unrein on Henri Rousseau
His mane strangely blows forward on a windless night, while his eye appears as a mesmerizing orb that plays off the moon and mandolin.
Lilian Day Thorpe on Nicolas de Staël
Breaking the natural world down into its basic forms, the painting as a whole evokes a quiet hum.
Azita Moradkhani on Louise Bourgeois
The tension between the bodies of mother and child builds up until the moment of physical separation with the delivery of a new entity in the world. Bourgeois depicts that moment using transparent skins of juicy crimson.
Constance Mallinson on Manet’s and von Werefkin’s Ragpickers
Few previous painters were capable of challenging and disturbing the consumerist mentality and self-satisfaction of the middle class and the economic and social systems that sustained them.
Zorawar Sidhu on František Kupka
Within a year of exhibiting it, he would never paint like this again