Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Jan 24 2025
Robert Motherwell: Elegies, Collage & the Intellectual Side of Abstract Expressionism
Robert Motherwell could make a painting feel monumental with remarkably little. A few enormous black forms against white might evoke mourning, imprisonment, architecture, bodies, or a procession moving across the canvas. A torn piece of cigarette packaging could become the center of a collage. A charcoal rectangle floating inside a field of ochre could open …
Jan 23 2025
Belkis Ayón: Sikán, Collography & the Silent World of Abakuá
Belkis Ayón filled enormous sheets of paper with figures who stare directly at us but cannot speak. Their eyes are wide and penetrating, their mouths absent, their bodies surrounded by scales, fish, serpents, crosses, plants, ritual objects, and dense surfaces of black, white, and gray. The images can feel ancient and startlingly contemporary at the …
Jan 21 2025
Jean-Paul Vroom: Printmaking, Ballet & the Art Between Worlds
Jean-Paul Vroom never seemed interested in remaining inside one artistic category. He engraved books in Paris, painted and made prints, designed typography, photographed people and landscapes, experimented with film, worked as an art director for cinema, and created sets and costumes for some of the most enduring ballets of Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen. Even …
Jan 20 2025
Esquivel! Stereo, Space Age Pop & the Sound of the Future
Long before synthesizers made futuristic sounds routine, Juan García Esquivel was already making orchestras behave as though they had escaped Earth’s gravity. Trumpets exploded from one speaker while voices answered from the other. Piano notes ricocheted across the stereo field. Steel guitar, percussion, whistles, wordless choruses, bells, and unexpected instrumental combinations appeared and disappeared with …
Jan 18 2025
Danny Kaye: Tongue Twisters, Technicolor & the Art of Entertainment
Danny Kaye could turn language into percussion. A list of Russian composers became a showstopper. A nonsensical string of syllables could accelerate until words seemed to lose their meaning entirely. A medieval drinking cup could become the center of one of Hollywood’s most elaborate verbal routines. Then, without changing performers, the same man could sing …
Jan 17 2025
Françoise Hardy: Yé-Yé, Melancholy & the Sound of French Cool
Françoise Hardy seemed almost completely unsuited to becoming a pop star. She disliked crowds, suffered from stage fright, distrusted celebrity, and wrote songs about romantic uncertainty with a seriousness far removed from the exuberant image usually associated with teenage pop. Yet when she appeared on French television in 1962 singing “Tous les garçons et les …
Jan 15 2025
Lee Bontecou: Black Holes, Machines & the Dark Side of the Space Age
Lee Bontecou made sculptures that seem to stare back. From a wall of patched canvas and welded steel, a black opening pushes toward the viewer. It might be the mouth of a machine, the lens of a camera, the barrel of a weapon, an eye, a wound, a cave, or a hole leading somewhere beyond …
Jan 15 2025
Soviet Film Wednesday: The Snow Queen
Snowflakes swirl through the air as an old storyteller explains that each one is like a tiny white bee serving a queen who lives far to the north. Somewhere beyond the familiar city, past frozen rivers, forests, palaces, and vast stretches of snow, the Snow Queen travels through the winter sky in a glittering sleigh. …
Jan 14 2025
The Stardust Lens of Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton could make a room look more glamorous than it really was, turn a movie costume into fashion history, transform a royal portrait into modern mythology, and photograph a bomb-injured child with a directness almost impossible to reconcile with the extravagant society pictures that first made him famous. Few creative careers contain such dramatic …
Jan 08 2025
Nora Dean: Barbwire, Reggae & a Voice That Refused Convention
Some singers become recognizable through the first note they sing. Nora Dean could accomplish it with a cry, a laugh, a stretched syllable, or one of the strange wordless exclamations she scattered through her records. Her voice could sound sweet and playful one moment, mischievous the next, and then suddenly turn raw enough to cut …
