Modernism
Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality
The Spectator
Martin Gayford reviews Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham Lakeside Arts, on view through February 19, 2017. Gayford observes: “Few artists made more abrupt stylistic swerves. Consequently, [Pasmore’s] career was a thesaurus of all the possibilities open to a 20th-century painter, from dingy social realism to millenarian modernism.”
Francis Picabia @ MoMA
Too Much Art
Mario Naves reviews Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on view through March 19, 2017. Naves concludes that the exhibition “is an attempt at promoting Picabia up the totem pole of great artists in the cause of revamping the Modernist ‘narrative.’ As played out […]
Matisse/Diebenkorn in Baltimore
ARTnews
Phyllis Tuchman reviews Matisse/Diebenkorn at the Baltimore Museum of Art, on view through January 29, 2017. Tuchman asserts: “Astonishingly, Diebenkorn’s paintings in Baltimore are never overshadowed, as you might expect, by Matisse’s masterpieces. The American … doesn’t just hold his own: he actually upstages Matisse… Like Matisse, he’s become the type of artist we expect to […]
Bonnard: En toute intimité
Studio International
Anna McNay reviews Bonnard: En toute intimité at the Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France, on view through April 23, 2017. McNay begins: “With the title Bonnard: En toute intimité, one might well expect an exhibition focusing on the artist’s nudes, or more erotic elements of his work, but, just as Tracey Emin’s tent, Everyone I […]
Francis Picabia’s Prescient, Painterly Promiscuousness
Hyperallergic
Dennis Kardon reviews Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on view through March 19, 2017. Kardon writes: Kardon writes: “Picabia, a pioneering modernist, has long been known as an early cubist and a leader of the anarchic Dada movement, while his later […]
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 […]
Emily Carr & Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia
Art:21 Magazine
Colin Browne considers the impact of a little known meeting between modernist painter Emily Carr and German surrealist Wolfgang Paalen on their subsequent work.
Walter Darby Bannard: Modernism isn’t a style … it’s a working attitude
artcritical
Franklin Einspruch remembers painter Walter Darby Bannard (1934 – 2016) and considers Bannard’s recent paintings as the culmination of a lifelong exploration of abstraction: “Modernism isn’t a style, [Bannard] insisted, it’s a working attitude oriented toward visual excellence. ‘Modernism is aspiring, authoritarian, hierarchical, self-critical, exclusive, vertically structured, and aims for the best,’ he wrote in 1984. But […]
The Gifts of Stuart Davis
The New Criterion
James Panero reviews Stuart Davis: In Full Swing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through September 25, 2016. Panero writes: “The particular genius of Davis’s subsequent modernist direction was how he went on to integrate European stylistic innovation with his unique Ashcan vision. Through the flattening, flickering, fleeting perspectives of […]
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Studio International
Anna McNay reviews the recent exhibition of works by Paula Modersohn-Becker at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. McNay writes: “[Modersohn-Becker’s] short but highly fertile career – she produced more than 700 paintings in seven years (1900-07), working seven days a week, ‘with a passion that excludes everything else’ – took place at […]
Soutine: Art More Like Life
A modest, yet riveting selection of paintings by Soutine at Paul Kasmin Gallery highlighted the artist’s feverish dedication to “sensations-in-paint.”
Braque at the Phillips Collection
Braque’s “second career” may, in retrospect, constitute his greater legacy.
Hilma Af Klint: Paintings for the Future
A new exhibition sheds new light on a pioneering abstract painter and one of the most enigmatic artists of the 20th century.