Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Mar 08 2025
Anselm Kiefer: Memory, Ruins & the Weight of History
Anselm Kiefer makes paintings that seem to have survived something. Their surfaces crack, burn, crumble, rust, and accumulate. Straw projects from paint. Lead hangs heavily from walls. Flowers dry and darken. Books become too heavy to open. Fields stretch toward uncertain horizons beneath scorched skies, while ruined buildings and abandoned interiors seem caught between archaeology …
Mar 06 2025
Pauline Boty: Pop Art, Celebrity & a Woman’s View of the 1960s
Pauline Boty painted the 1960s from inside them. Marilyn Monroe smiles from a strip of canvas. Jean-Paul Belmondo becomes an object of openly expressed female desire. Newspaper photographs collide with flowers, movie stars, political scandals, abstract shapes, revolutionary slogans, and saturated areas of red, yellow, blue, and green. In other paintings, anonymous women appear beside …
Mar 05 2025
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poetry, Cinema & the Contradictions of Modern Italy
Pier Paolo Pasolini never seemed interested in making life easier for his audience, his critics, his political allies, or himself. He was a poet who became a novelist, a novelist who became a filmmaker, a Marxist who remained fascinated by Christianity, an atheist who made one of cinema’s most moving films about Christ, and an …
Mar 03 2025
Ronald Searle: St Trinian’s, Molesworth & the Art of the Restless Line
Ronald Searle could make a line look exhausted, furious, elegant, nervous, pompous, half-starved, or completely unhinged. His drawings rarely sit quietly on the page. Buildings lean, noses stretch, limbs bend at improbable angles, schoolgirls advance like small armed revolutionaries, cats appear to have survived several nights of bad decisions, and respectable institutions begin to collapse …
Mar 02 2025
Lou Reed: The Velvet Underground, New York & the Art of Noise
Lou Reed wanted rock and roll to carry the weight of literature without losing the excitement of three chords played loudly in a small room. Across more than five decades, he wrote about people rarely given much space in mainstream popular music, pushed electric guitars toward abstraction and noise, celebrated the possibilities of a perfectly …
Feb 27 2025
Rolly Crump: Whimsy, Weirdness & the Art of Disney Imagineering
Rolly Crump belonged to a generation of Disney artists who were asked to do something almost unprecedented: take the visual imagination developed inside animation studios and turn it into physical places people could walk through. In Crump’s hands, that challenge produced spinning kinetic sculptures, strange clocks, talking tikis, haunted contraptions, psychedelic patterns, theatrical shops, enchanted …
Feb 26 2025
Tarō Okamoto: The Tower of the Sun & the Art of Explosion
Tarō Okamoto wanted art to hit people before they had time to become comfortable with it. His paintings burst with primary colors, eyes, faces, spikes, organic shapes, black lines, and forms that look simultaneously ancient and futuristic. His sculptures frequently resemble beings rather than objects, while his public monuments seem less interested in blending politely …
Feb 25 2025
Mark Rothko: Color, Silence & the Search for the Sublime
Mark Rothko became famous for paintings that appear, at first, almost impossibly simple. Two or three rectangles float against a field of color. Their edges blur. Reds glow beside black, orange seems to breathe against yellow, purple settles into brown, and vast surfaces appear simultaneously solid and strangely immaterial. There are no recognizable people, landscapes, …
Feb 24 2025
Richard Hamilton: Pop Art, Consumer Culture & the Modern Image
Richard Hamilton looked at the postwar world and saw something traditional art could no longer afford to ignore. Television sets were entering living rooms. Automobiles were being sold through carefully engineered fantasies of speed and status. Advertising filled magazines with perfectly photographed refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, bodies, food, furniture, and cosmetics. Hollywood transformed people into reproducible …
Feb 23 2025
Tom Wesselmann: Pop Art, Color & the Great American Nude
A refrigerator door, a bottle of soda, a pair of bright red lips, a cigarette, a telephone, a bowl of fruit, an American flag, and the curve of a reclining body might seem like unlikely ingredients for fine art. For Tom Wesselmann, however, they belonged to the visual vocabulary of modern America. Born on February …
