Alexei Jawlensky, Meditation: My Spirit Will Live On, 1935, oil on cardboard (Museum Wiesbaden © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York for Alexei Jawlensky)
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Alexei Jawlensky at the Neue Galerie, New York (through May 29) and Vija Celmins at Matthew Marks, New York (through April 15).
Schjeldahl writes: "... The [Jawlensky] show ends with the kicker of a room of small, even tiny, paintings, unfamiliar to me, of an abstracted face. A black stripe serves for the nose, horizontal bands for the eyes and mouth. The nose and eyes present as a cruciform, against grounds of vertical strokes in thinned colors that glow like stained glass."
"When looking at a Celmins picture,"Schjeldahl notes, "I can never decide whether to take it in as a supremely elegant object or to gaze into it with free-falling imagination. I am off balance while transfixed."
via:
The New Yorker
