fine art art criticism

Washington’s National Gallery Showcases ‘Degas at the Opera’

For today’s audiences entranced by cell phone entertainments, the idea of going to a grand communal event is a rarity if not a total unknown. But there was a time when entertainment aimed at conveying a larger national character. For nineteenth century France, the Paris Opera declaimed itself the grandest of the grand—it was the nation’s cultural and social center, and people dressed in high foppery to showcase the importance of being French. It was all about unabashed spectacle.

All mages are 30 x 30″, Digital print on Canson Arches Infinity Watercolor Paper (acid free), framed, Limited edition (1/3 ed of 3 +1AP), 2018. Courtesy of Robert Kananaj Gallery and the artist.

Solitude surrounds the guest when entering Emmanuel Monzon’s exhibition at Robert Kananaj Gallery. All the photographs seem similar at first glance in their quiet compositions and monochrome colours. Taking a closer look, one recognizes their nuances – and becomes mesmerised by their magical beauty. They radiate an ephemeral, almost surreal tension that captivates the viewer.More

New York’s Petzel Gallery with Dana Schutz: “Imagine Me and You”

Dana Scutz, Beat Out the Sun, oil on canvas, 94 x 87.5,” 2018

Petzel Gallery presents “Dana Schutz, “Imagine Me and You,” an exhibition of twelve new large-scale oil paintings and five bronze sculptures that makes visual commentary in multilayered social, personal and political tableaux. Schutz confidently confront the viewer directly, with breathtakingly fierce, even brutal images. They are not “pretty”; the artist is not overly preoccupied with aesthetics, or with traditional “good taste.” Her assertive art is instead utterly honest, prepped to seize the awareness of a media-saturated public for whom art, film and television supply an overload of daily visual sustenance.More

New York’s Laura Pels Theatre, ‘Skintight’: Love, Lust, Beauty, and Idina Menzel

Eli Gelb (Benjamin) and Idina Menzel (Jodi). Unless noted, all photos by Joan Marcus (2018)

Idid not see Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews which by general consensus is said to be his best play to date. But the last three Harmon plays that I did see, Significant Other, Admissions, and the still running Skintight – it closes on August 26^th – each, a familiar mixture of comedy and drama containing everything and the kitchen sink, come across less a play, more a TV sitcom in which the playwright’s comedic hand overrides most everything important that is being said.More

“Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” at Washington’s National Gallery of Art

Davis, Stuart — Cover image for NGA exhibition: ‘Stuart Davis: In Full Swing,’ *Owh! on San Pao* (1951). Detailed caption info for all images at end of review

Stuart Davis (1892-1964) is considered to be one of America’s first modern artists and a precursor of Pop Art. He was an enthused colorist whose bright, well-developed paintings translated French Cubism into an unquestionably American art expression. Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, currently on view at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, considers his work from 1921 and his breakthrough paintings of tobacco packages. It then moves through five decades to his final canvas, demonstrating through the chronology Davis’s habit of recycling earlier work for new compositions. With more than one hundred of his most important, visually complex compositions on view, the exhibition highlights Davis’s ability to assimilate the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, the lessons of cubism, and the sounds and rhythms of jazz into works that hum with intelligence and energy.More

Gallery 100 New York: International Artists Draw ‘A Fine Line’

Alan Sonfist, “Leaves Frozen in Time: Spring,” Mix Media on Canvas, 4 x 4 ft. (122 x 122 cm.) no date provided

A Fine Line, the inaugural exhibition for the newly launched Gallery 100 New York, presents an amalgamation of the varied but related works of four international artists, who use straightforward natural materials with telling effect. The show curated by gallery director Michelle Loh, features Wang Huangsheng, Oliver Catté, Mahmoud Hamadani, and Alan Sonfist. An express emphasis on paper unites the installation; there is an aura of purity emanating from the white paper of the drawings on view that permeates the space. Color plays an important tandem role; hues glitter in conjunction with the brown cardboard works, and in the nature-based leaf piece entitled “Leaves Frozen in Time: Spring.” The abstract drawings explore the essential delicacy of paper as it comingles with ink flowing irregularly over the surfaces, while the creative potential and durability of cardboard come sharply into focus in cityscapes that radiate urban exuberance. Traditional underpinnings resound through the exhibition; the use of ink, which is made from tree bark, is a medium used for millennia in Asian and Middle Eastern cultures. More

Holiday Inn: Roundabout Theatre Brings the Past into the Present

Corbin Bleu stars in New York’s Studio 54 production of Gershwin’s Holiday Inn. All photos: Joan Marcus (2016).

The Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Holiday Inn, The New Irving Berlin Musical, currently playing at Studio 54, first showed its lyrical face at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House where it had its world premier during the holiday season in 2014. With a book co-written by Chad Hodge and Gordon Greenberg (he is also the director), Holiday Inn, stuffed with 22 Irving Berlin songs, some standards, others resurrected from the dead, is back on the boards again. Other than Radio City Music Hall’s yearly Christmas spectacular, it is the only major holiday themed production in New York City whose specific marketing goal is to brighten The Great White Way during this ‘Holidaze‘ Season.More

New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery with Matthias Bitzer: a different sort of gravity

Matthias Bitzer, Installation view. Foreground: phosphor notes (a different sort of gravity), mixed media (2016)

The works in Matthias Bitzer’s show, “a different sort of gravity” couldn’t be more confounding or diverse; this is the show’s aim. On my first view, I found the installation to be incoherent, even confusing. It took my breath away. On the second view I realized that the exhibit resonates with a sense of its true meaning, but this baffling heterogeneous display takes time to grasp. More

Early Modernism/Futurism Had Roots in Eastern Europe as well as Paris, Moscow

www.artesmagazine.com — Tiflis, now Georgia's capitol, Tbilisi (c. 1891-1916)

Paris might have been the artistic hub of European cultural life and modern ideas at the beginning of the 20th century, but the majority of its great thinkers and artists came from abroad, such as Spain, the U.S. and even Russia. There is one group of artists and avant-gardes who contributed, not only to the bohemian artistic underworld of Paris at that time, but ignited their art back at home in their capital of Tiflis, Republic of Georgia.

The Former Soviet Republic of Georgia is frequently left out of the art history discussions when the topic of Western art comes up, perhaps this is due to the unconventional evolution of art within the South Caucasian country, where easel painting didn’t exist until the 18th century. However, the art scene in Tiflis, modern-day Tbilisi, in the 1910s was perhaps one of the most exciting in Europe outside of Paris and Moscow. artes fine arts magazineMore