Previously in this space, I have written about the necessity of seeing works of art in person, as well as about the materiality of oil paint. This week my research led me to the art of David Stern, who uses…
In one of those quirks of the alphabet I wrote about when considering Joseph Cornell and Earl Cunningham, my list of twentieth century American artists includes Jim Dine and Mark di Suvero back-to-back. Both longtime, well-known contemporary artists, the two…
Back in October, I wrote about the moment around the turn of the twentieth century when photography became art. In that post, I examined the work of F. Holland Day and Gertrude Käsebier, two of the most influential figures in…
Recently I wrote about the changing taste for American modernism, and the impact these changes had on the career and legacy of the painter Ilya Bolotowsky. As I was researching Bolotowsky, I learned about his involvement in the group American…
Last week, I wrote about the shifting American taste in modern art at the middle of the twentieth century. I’d like to revisit that subject again this week, prompted by my research on one of the most famous—and, in her…
Recently, while conducting research on the painter Elizabeth Murray (herself worthy of a future blog post), I came across an interesting anecdote. In 1994 Kirk Varnedoe, the Museum of Modern Art’s Chief Curator of Painting, asked Murray to curate an…
Flashback to December, and I am looking out the window at a sheet of ice, deposited in my corner of the Blue Ridge by the December Nor’easter that is rapidly dumping huge amounts of snow on various parts of the…
In this blog series, I have tended to focus closely on American art. This is, of course, mostly by design: I am a specialist in art of the United States, and the project I’m working on is all about CFAM’s…
I was inspired to write this post after enjoying a recent CFAM Work of the Week: Derricks at Night by the American printmaker Martin Lewis. In her introduction of the print Curator Gisela Carbonell relates Lewis’s relationship with the work…
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the painter Wolf Kahn’s dramatic escape from Germany on the eve of World War II. This week, I came across a similar story, this one from Kahn’s slightly older colleague Richard Lindner. Lindner,…
This week I have been considering Black Squall at Gibraltar, a recent addition to the collection. Its maker, James E. Buttersworth, is one of those artists, like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who was prolific and comfortably successful in his own time,…
I have long wanted to discuss the related disciplines of art conservation and technical art history on this blog but hadn’t found the right angle until now. In part, that’s because I haven’t been able to travel to look at…
In the last entry of this blog, I wrote about the American painter Wolf Kahn, whom the art historian Barbara Novak regarded as perfectly blending the American landscape tradition with the formal innovations of Abstract Expressionism.1 In this post I…
Lost (for me at least) amid all the tumult of March, when the first wave of COVID-19-related shutdowns were cascading across the country, was the March 15 death at age 92 of the painter Wolf Kahn. Having just completed my…
Today I would like to consider two photographs by American photographers, The Red Man by Gertrude Käsebier and Ziletta by F. Holland Day. The two images are remarkably similar, presenting close-up, cropped depictions of the human face. Both photos, reproduced…
