New York Review of Books

Picasso’s Transformations
New York Review of Books

With numerous exhibitions and publications marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973, 2023 has been a year to reconsider the most famous artist of the 20th century. Reviewing a number of these shows and books about the artist, Jed Perl laments that for all this attention and celebration, “Picasso, a titan among […]

Constable’s Quiet Tumult
New York Review of Books

Christopher Benfey reviews three books about John Constable: John Constable: A Portrait by James Hamilton, Constable’s White Horse by William Kentridge and Aimee Ng, and Late Constable by Anne Lyles, Matthew Hargraves, and others. Benfrey reviews each book while considering the question “What do John Constable’s seductive paintings—those cunningly constructed scenes of English rural life […]

David Bomberg’s Profound Modernism
New York Review of Books

Fran Bigman reviews works by David Bomberg recently on view at the Ben Uri Gallery, London. Bigman writes: “Bomberg’s work, first deemed too radical by many established critics of the time, would later gain the reputation of being too conservative. Bomberg’s entire career can seem like a litany of failure. Labeled an “English Cubist” or […]

Devastatingly Human
New York Review of Books

Jenny Uglow reviews All Too Human: Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life at the Tate Britain through August 27, 2018. Uglow begins: “The gripping and dramatic show … merits its title: it is ‘all too human’ in the tender, painful works that form its core. But ‘a century of painting life’ promises something wider—does it smack […]

Steve DiBenedetto: A Denatured Humanism
New York Review of Books

Dan Nadel reviews Steve DiBenedetto: Toasted with Everything at Derek Eller Gallery, New York, on view through April 22, 2018. Nadel notes that DiBenedetto’s paintings “are first and foremost creations of the physical act of brush and scraper on canvas—where once DiBenedetto layered his paintings with allusions to psychedelic phenomena, science fiction films and literature, and modernist […]

Josef Albers: Bauhaus in Mexico
New York Review of Books

J. Hoberman reviews Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through March 28, 2018. Hoberman writes that the exhibition “makes Albers’s appreciation [of Mexico] evident, juxtaposing his studies, typically drawn on graph paper, with both his finished artwork (mostly paintings, one lithograph) and his fastidious arrangements of tiny on-site photographs. Serially organized […]

Fragonard’s Merry Company
New York Review of Books

Colin B. Bailey writes about Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures recently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bailey writes that the show “[celebrates] the thirty-seven-year-old Fragonard as a practitioner of ‘pure painting’—an action painter avant la lettre. His rainbow palette is ‘parrot colored’—to use a term that was applied to Renoir in the heyday of […]

Laura Owens: Art in Free Fall
New York Review of Books

David Salle writes about the work of Laura Owens on the occasion of a recent mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Salle writes: “Owens’s paintings are squarely in the middle of a postmodern aesthetic that’s been gaining momentum for the last ten or fifteen years. It […]

Camille Pissarro: The Perennial Student
New York Review of Books

Julian Bell reviews two exhibitions: Camille Pissarro: Le premier des impressionnistes at the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (through July 16) and Pissarro à Éragny: La nature retrouvée at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (through July 9). Bell writes: “Nearly always, Pissarro composes poems about passing light that can be mapped intelligibly, letting you know just […]

Ellen Berkenblit @ Anton Kern
New York Review of Books

Dan Nadel reviews paintings by Ellen Berkenblit recently on view at Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Nadel writes: “In defiance and celebration of the earthen black that surrounds them, the vigorously delineated horses, flowers, hands, faces, stripes, a nude, and a foot found in Ellen Berkenblit’s striking new paintings at Anton Kern Gallery are a […]

Matisse: The Joy of Things
New York Review of Books

Claire Messud reviews Matisse in the Studio at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on view through July 9, 2017. Messud writes: “this glorious exhibition impresses the viewer also with simpler, more atavistic and abiding truths: Matisse’s passion for color, for light, for pattern, for flowers and the female figure; and his conviction—borne out in […]

The Vitality of the ‘Berlin Painter’
New York Review of Books

James Romm reviews The Berlin Painter and His World‌, on view at the Princeton University Art Museum through June 11, 2017. Romm writes: “The Berlin Painter began working at the end of the sixth century BC, when the red-figure technique of vase painting—in which black glaze fills the background, leaving silhouettes of unglazed red ceramic to […]

Rauschenberg: The Confidence Man of American Art
New York Review of Books

Jed Perl reviews Robert Rauschenberg recently on view at Tate Modern, London. The exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from May 21 – September 17, 2017, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from November 4 – March 25, 2018. Perl writes: “The trouble with Robert Rauschenberg is that adventure and […]

Howard Hodgkin: Paintings That Shout
New York Review of Books

Jenny Uglow reviews Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on view through June 18, 2017. Uglow writes: “It always feels wrong to scatter words around Howard Hodgkin’s paintings. Their tactile richness should just burn into eyes and minds, leaving a trace behind the eyelids, a memory to which we can return. […]

Josef Albers: Art to Open Eyes
New York Review of Books

An excerpt from Nicholas Fox Weber’s preface for the catalog of One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, on view at the Museum of Modern Art through April 2, 2017. Weber writes: “Josef assembled these photo-collages in the years when he was also constructing furniture, sandblasting glass, and teaching the nature […]

Hercules Segers: Master of the Unreal
New York Review of Books

Christopher Benfey reviews The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through May 21, 2017. Benfey writes: “An air of unreality hangs over the astonishing exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers … More than once, I found myself wondering whether this extraordinary etcher and painter—the creator […]

Elliott Green: The Painter of Continuous Motion
New York Review of Books

Jana Prikryl writes about the paintings of Elliott Green which are on view at Pierogi Gallery, New York, through March 26, 2017. Prikryl begins: “Elliott Green’s paintings appear to be in continuous motion, the way animals, plants, and ultimately rocks and mountains are in continuous motion, even when our human vision fails to apprehend it. […]

Carmen Herrera: Art Without Lies
New York Review of Books

Claire Messud reviews Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight recently on view at the Whitney Museum, New York. Messud writes: “From the first, Herrera deployed line and color with an energy intensified by her rigor. A City (1948), with its blocks of lemon yellow, black, and cobalt blue, foreshadows a palate that recurred in later series. […]

Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism
New York Review of Books

J. Hoberman reviews Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view through January 8, 2017. Hoberman writes: “To a degree, ‘Paint the Revolution’ is the story of the three star muralists, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, who along with the posthumously canonized Frida Kahlo, defined the new […]

The Soul of Alice Neel
New York Review of Books

Claire Messud reviews the new catalogue Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life (Mercatorfonds/Yale University Press). The exhibition will be on view at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Netherlands from November 5, 2016 – February 12, 2017. Messud concludes: “This exhilarating compendium of Neel’s oeuvre is remarkably cohesive, in spite of the diversity of Neel’s images and subjects, […]