Archives: Modern
Mark Greenwold on Jack Levine
Greenbergian Modernism… has put nails in the coffins of all sorts of serious and interesting representational artists for most of my lifetime.
Judith Bernstein on Edvard Munch
He created a vertigo inducing composition, extraordinary in its manifestation of Existentialism…
John Moore on Pierre Roy
In the seventies while living in Philadelphia I spent a lot of time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where I first saw Pierre Roy’s Metric System.
Murray Zimiles on Kazimir Malevich
In keeping with communist doctrine, he claims that his work glorifies the proletariat…
Laura Newman on a Diagonal Line in Matisse’s ‘View of Notre Dame’
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.
Roberto Juarez on Hilma af Klint
Her paintings spoke to me in a personal yet enigmatic way. I had yet to experience anything like them.
Richard Kalina on Stuart Davis
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.
Nancy Hagin on Giorgio Morandi
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.
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...