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UNDER THE RADAR

A spotlight for members.

Cindy Blakeslee

Recent Feature

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Talk about “Surrealism” in conversation with artists and art lovers you are most likely to think of works by Dalí, Magritte, Tanguy, Ernst, or possibly Paul Delvaux. Mention “American Surrealism,” and the terrain gets tricky. Didn’t Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and...

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Recent Feature

L.A. Confidential

L.A. Confidential

The first in a series of reports on the art world.  In May, it seemed like we were almost entirely out of the woods with Covid-19, and then along came the Delta variant and the post-pandemic euphoria rapidly dissipated. Still, as long-time observers of the Los Angeles...

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From the Vasari21 Archives

The Motherhood Report

No one claims it's easy, but it is possible to combine two of the world's oldest callings: artist and mother Way back in the 1980s, in the era of linebacker shoulder pads and dressing for success, I worked on a short-lived publication that billed itself as the first...

What Is a Drawing? Part Four

Earlier in the week, I tried to imagine what kind of responses I would have gotten had I posed that question to one of the great masters of the Renaissance. “Signora,” I can hear Maestro Buonarrotti explaining, con pazienza, “a drawing can be many things. A quick...

Me, Myself, and I Part 3

It’s curious to me that more women than men responded to the call for a third round-up of self-portraits on Vasari21. That’s possibly because there are more female members than male (though I can’t tell you the exact ratio), possibly because women traditionally spend...

What Is a Drawing? Part Five

In the third iteration of this series, I noted that the possibilities for drawing have expanded hugely in the last century or so. Picasso made drawings with a small electric light in a darkened room. Calder’s Circus can be seen as an assemblage of three-dimensional...

Whazzup with All the Gallery Closings?

And what exactly does a "private dealer" do? When I heard early in the summer that the venerable Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea was closing its doors to transition to “private practice,” my heart sank a little. The low-key establishment on West 25th Street was...

Storytelling in Three Dimensions

Installation Artists Continue the Narrative Tradition Once upon a time, storytelling was one of the most ambitious missions of painting. Panel by panel, Giotto told the lives of Christ and St. Francis. Michelangelo presented the sweeping drama of the Old and New...

À la Recherche de Jeanne Duval

Who Was the Mysterious Mistress Immortalized by Two 19th-century Geniuses, Charles Baudelaire and Édouard Manet The widespread protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May, abetted by the swelling powers of the Black Lives Matter movement, got some of us with...

So You Want to Be in Pictures?

If you catch a set decorator's eye, it just might happen As readers know, I have developed a peculiar fascination with the art featured in shows on the big and small screens—who chooses this work? where do they find the art? what are the guiding factors behind the...

The Curators Speak

In the world of museum exhibitions and gallery shows, the curator seems like the Wizard of Oz, the behind-the-scenes magician who pulls it all together and leads us Munchkins down a yellow brick road toward some kind of enlightenment…

Dabbling in Dura-Lar

Your fearless correspondent takes another class It’s always seemed to me that a big part of the fun of art-making lies in the endless amounts of seductive stuff to play with—paints and brushes, pencils and charcoal and pastels, clay and plaster and all kinds of goo,...

Archived Feature

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

 By Lee Albert Hill As a painter myself I am drawn to the work of other painters first and foremost.  Especially those who demonstrate a dedication to a lush, hands-on, painterly approach and an emphasis on refined craft and detail.  For this curation I have chosen...

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Archived Feature

Suggestions for Summer Reading

Suggestions for Summer Reading

Get a jump on the season with a beach-bag full of memoirs Perhaps because I’ve been working on one of my own (“Rotten Romance,” dispatched via Substack every Sunday), memoirs have been much on my mind. For purely recreational reading, I often prefer first-person...

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Archived Feature

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

It’s a brave artist who attempts to say something new about landscape. The genre has been around since ancient times, when frescoes of Arcadian vistas adorned the walls of upscale villas, and its popularity has waxed and waned according to the talents and interests of...

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Archived Under the Radar

Marietta Patricia Leis

Marietta Patricia Leis

Like many little girls, Marietta Patricia Leis first set her sights on becoming a ballerina. “At the age of seven I was entranced with wanting to be a ballet dancer,” she says. As a child in suburban East Orange, NJ, she studied dance every day after school, and...

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Archived Under the Radar

Susan English

Susan English

When Susan English was three or four years old, she lived in Belgium with her family for a couple of years. Years later she still remembers a babysitter named Hele placing a candle inside a child’s play igloo. “It made a big impression on me,” English says. “The light...

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 Archived Podcast

Alice Robb: Why We Dream

Alice Robb: Why We Dream

In the summer of 2011, science writer Alice Robb discovered a book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, which promised readers that they could control the plots of their dreams.

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