Feb 04 2025
A patterned handkerchief, a piece of Japanese wrapping paper, a blurred photograph, a newspaper image, or the outline of a flower might seem like very modest material from which to build an artistic career. For Daan van Golden, that modesty was precisely the point. He developed an art based not on constantly inventing new images, …
Feb 02 2025
A skylight, a fire escape, votive candles, flowers, the glow of a city after dark, or the fleeting reflection of light on an ordinary surface could become something mysterious in the hands of Loren MacIver. She did not need monumental subjects to make memorable paintings. Instead, she looked carefully at the small experiences most people …
Jan 30 2025
Patrick Heron believed color could do more than decorate a painting. Color could create space, generate movement, alter the apparent size of a shape, and even change the way a viewer experienced the world beyond the canvas. Across a career that moved from recognizable interiors and harbor views to stripes, floating forms, irregular discs, luminous …
Jan 29 2025
Long before Sacha Distel became famous for the tuxedo, the effortless smile, and the warm voice that seemed designed for late-night television, he was sitting in Paris jazz clubs with a guitar, trying to keep up with some of the best musicians of the postwar era. The polished crooner image came later. Jazz came first. …
Jan 28 2025
Marcel Broodthaers spent years trying to make a life through poetry. Then, at the age of forty, he took copies of one of his unsold poetry books, embedded them in plaster, and transformed the failure to sell literature into the beginning of an art career. It was an appropriately paradoxical entrance for an artist who …
Jan 27 2025
Some singers seem to belong to daylight. Maki Asakawa belonged to the hours after midnight. Dressed almost entirely in black, often hidden behind dark glasses and surrounded by cigarette smoke, she created a stage presence that seemed inseparable from the music itself. Her low, weathered voice could move through blues, jazz, spirituals, folk songs, chanson, …
Jan 25 2025
Few pieces of music can summon a place as quickly as an Antônio Carlos Jobim song. A quiet piano chord, a gently shifting harmony, the restrained pulse of samba, and suddenly Rio de Janeiro seems to appear: mountains descending toward the water, apartment windows open to the night, rain arriving at the end of summer, …
Jan 24 2025
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 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 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 …
