Archives: Modern

In Matisse’s View of Notre Dame, a diagonal line reaches out of the pentimenti, which establish the artist’s side of a French window, and spans the Seine.

A little while ago I went to the Stuart Davis retrospective at the Whitney. I was expecting to like it, and I did. I’ve seen my fair share of Davis’ paintings over the years, and I have particularly fond memories of his solo 1991 Metropolitan Museum exhibition, Stuart Davis: American Painter.

The first Morandi painting that I ever saw was at the Pittsburgh International Triennial Exhibition of 1958. I was a first year art student at Carnegie Mellon University, then called Carnegie Tech.

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.

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...

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...

I was a young artist in the early 1950’s feeling the weight of a male-dominated art world in places I frequented…