Archives: Modern
Kristen Schiele on Charles Burchfield
Charles Burchfield’s landscape paintings are riveting. This painting, Sphinx and Milky Way, with its bat-like shapes, celestial falling stars, deep midnight blue and black center, flowers with faces, and symbolic points of light, pulls me in with a kind of intensity I’ve discovered in few others.
Curt Barnes on Morris Louis
Morris Louis, Tet, 1958, Acrylic (Magma) on raw cotton duck canvas, 94 x 152 inches Allan Kaprow was so enormously impressed with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings that he said they constituted the last paintings, that they made any further painting impossible. The...
Elena Soterakis on George Bellows
George Bellows, Excavation at Night, 1908, Oil on canvas, 33 x 44 inches No other artist captured the chaos created in the name of progress in early 20th century New York City better than George Bellows. His paintings of the Penn Station excavation, violent and...
Maria Calandra on Joan Miró
Joan Miró, Potato, 1928, Oil on Canvas, 39 3/4 x 32 1/8 inches, The Met With the potency of red bordering blue, Potato, recently re-installed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an invigorating walk through Miro’s fantastical world of invented pictorial language and...
Audrey Flack on de Kooning’s Women
I was a young artist in the early 1950’s feeling the weight of a male-dominated art world in places I frequented…
Tony Robbin on Bonnard’s Bathers
It is often said that Pierre Bonnard’s paintings featuring bathers are intimate works, as the women are caught unawares, glimpsed in unguarded and private moments…
James Esber on George Grosz
George Grosz, The Painter of the Hole, 1948, Oil on canvas, 30 x 22 inches In 1947 George Grosz made a watercolor called Painter of the Hole, which was refined into a painting on canvas the following year. In the second version an artist (Grosz himself?) stares...
Philip Koch: Sailing Lessons from Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper, Sailing, 1911, Oil on canvas, 24 x 29 inches Last August I did some traveling to see art. As an artist I was determined to learn everything I could about the watercolorist Charles Burchfield. My destination was Salem, Ohio to visit the home where...
Melissa Meyer Remembers Jean Dubuffet at the Jeu de Paume, 1991
These paintings by Dubuffet are currently up at Pace Gallery!
Marcela Florido on Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer, The Nativity, 1912, Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches I first encountered Stanley Spencer’s The Nativity hanging on the walls of the Houseman Room, the dining hall for faculty at UCL. The space in the painting was strangely described; the rhythm, set by...
Barry Nemett on Gwen John
The building weighs less than a flower. The parasol stem dreams about being a wicker chair…
Margaret Grimes on Ruth Miller
The still life paintings of Ruth Miller are at first glance deceptively modest. On closer viewing however, they have a compelling power comparable to a gravitational pull.