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George is another photographer who never exhibited while alive. British born, she lived in Edinburgh, working as a community worker and photographer for local newspapers. After her death an archive of over 60,000 images was found in her garden shed. Those images depict “the personal and the local” – street protests, children at play, community…
A not-entirely serious riff on a recent list of the 100 most-visited museums. Foot traffic is a necessary sign of “cultural influence” but far from sufficient. A superb collection – “wall to wall art bangers” – is also a must-have, plus the infrastructure to cope with the flow of visitors. Reputation maintenance demands that great…
A “nostalgic” exhibition that surveys a century of American photography. Stieglitz is generally credited with the first modernist photograph in 1907. From there America produced a roll call of great image makers, both men and women. Inevitably, much focus lands on that greatest of all melting pots, New York city. Some famous photographers, being recent…
Spectacularly cynical take on a New York auction of “rich-guy art” that bores the writer “catatonic”. Many attendees “had brought their dogs—the better to help them imagine the art hanging in their living rooms, I suppose.” Once the sale starts “nothing can topple the awesome power of English accents.” The writer focuses on “a fully…
Dipping a toe into the theory of art. No object is inherently art (!). Rather, art is defined by what a curator intends an object to do, namely contribute to a ”web of discourse”. Thus, sometimes an object will be art and sometimes not. Is this a practical view? What if an object never provokes…
A renowned former art gallery director assesses LACMA’s dramatic building. A new building was sorely needed, and its exterior has “undeniable Brutalist power”. High internal natural light levels and raw concrete walls limit what art can be placed where. “Shockingly”, the building allows barely 1% of the collection to be shown. Is the building just…
Saar leapt into fine art on seeing an exhibition of assemblages by Joseph Cornell. Soon enough she was scouring garage sales for objects with “a certain energy” that she could use in her shoe box sized assemblages. Often, they addressed political themes, most famously those where she included (and ridiculed) Black mammy figures that represented…
Shimizu, a Japanese ceramicist and Living National Treasure, was a “supreme technician” of glaze chemistry. Iron-rich glazes behave unpredictably when fired. The finest examples are miracles of artist and kiln and have a tradition separate from general ceramics. Unlike the wabi-sabi aesthetic of rustic Japanese ceramics, Shimizu’s pursued a modern style of great restraint where…
Church was America’s first art star, a virtuoso of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. His reputation rested partly on landscapes painted in remote places like the Andes which carried “intimations of the sublime”. More memorably, though, he painted America, even as it struggled to shake off its “colonial origins”. His work told stories…
Meyerowitz switched to full-time photography in 1962 and spent about a decade working on the streets of New York. In 1972 he took a break from the city and, armed with an old large format camera, spent a summer in Cape Cod. With its “luminous” colour images of late afternoon and twilight the resulting book,…