Author Archive

The Met’s Chardin Retrospective

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

The Quiet Man Jean-Simeon Chardin, one of the 18th century’s most important artists and arguably history’s most accomplished painter of still lifes, was born in Paris in a humble household, the son of a maker of cabinets and billiard tables. Narrowly avoiding a tradesman’s career, Chardin joined a venerable but undistinguished art academy, then left
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The 80s: The Decade Art Forgot

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

The Decade That Art Forgot The most famous painter in Northern Europe in the 1870s was an Austrian named Hans Makart. Collectors from around the world flocked to his studio, hundreds of acolytes hung on his every word, acknowledgment of his genius appeared so obvious that the lionizing press he received seemed, above all, redundant.
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The Wickedly Tender, Kindly Unforgiving Paintings of Alice Neel

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Alice Neel Alice Neel, American artist, bohemian and feminist avant la lettre, turned, as the legend goes, a lifetime of personal setbacks into a uniquely incisive brand of portraiture while becoming a colorful celebrity in her own right. Painting during her last two decades the likenesses of art world bigwigs, the poet Frank O’Hara, the
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Young British Art’s Ambiguous Legacy

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

"Freeze" Frame In 1988 some students from Goldsmiths College in London, led by a bullish and enterprising young art punk named Damien Hirst, filled an empty administrative building in that city’s Docklands with their unproven art. Coolly titled "Freeze," the exhibition was not, despite its grunge appeal, exactly the garage-band equivalent of a posh gallery
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Frederic Edwin Church, Painter of the American Sublime

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

ont face=”New York” size=6> The Promised Land "In the beginning, all the world was America," John Locke wrote. Pristine as untracked snow, virginal in both spirit and conception, America as a God-given, singularly vast wilderness became for 19th-century American artists the high-minded road leading to a decidedly national art. On the Continent, the Romantic age
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Gillian Wearing in Chelsea: Psychic Violence in the Alcoholic Pit

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

When nominated for England’s prestigious Turner prize, which she went on to win in 1997, the judges described the work of Wearing as "confessional art in which she persuades her fellow citizens to reveal their most secret thoughts and desires." But confessional is a tag that, like sensationalistic, fits Wearing’s work awkwardly or not at
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Lucian Freud, English National Oddity and Treasure

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Lucian Freud "The English," Voltaire said with characteristic zing, "have 23 religions and two sauces." Phlegm, puritan and traditionalist, has long been a quality associated with the English national character. Stolidity, stiff-upper-lipness, a marked preference for custom over innovation, and a general unwillingness to experiment–these unfortunate traits have marked English culture since at least Voltaire’s
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Fabstraction

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Fabstraction What’s cooking in the New York arts world right now? In a word, abstraction so good-looking it should be called fabstraction. Far from the impeccably illuminated rationality of modernist progenitors like Mondrian and Kandinsky; beyond the gravitas and anguish that once made 50s abstract expressionism all the existential rage; way past the Baudrillardian, capital-driven
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See You in Hell: James Nachtwey’s Harrowing Photojournalism

Written by Christian Viveros-Faune on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

See You In Hell Every so often, James Nachtwey travels to hell and back. Returning from battlefields with faraway place names like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, Rwanda, Romania, Bosnia and Chechnya, Nachtwey witnesses bloody, flame-filled hell for those few who will listen. Recording the suffering perpetrated by human agency, he scours the globe
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