Articles
Ripe for Rediscovery: Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia was a man way ahead of his times. Long before artists of our day became dedicated multitaskers—moving easily from performance to sculpture to video to whatever—Picabia (1879-1953) vigorously avoided any singular style or medium, forging a career that...
Under the Radar: Bonny Leibowitz
The unfolding of an artist’s life and work is a strange and mysterious process. If you’ve been following the posts in “Under the Radar,” you see that there’s no one-size-fits-all. Ted Larsen took several years off to rethink his direction. Phillis Ideal moved from one...
A Few Words About Words
Occasionally a reader of Vasari21 has written or said to me, “I really enjoy your blog!” And I have been known to snap back, “It’s not a blog. It’s more like a magazine. I don’t know what to call it. Maybe I should call it a webazine.” I don’t mean to be so prickly...
Melissa Stern
If you happen to get to Charleston, SC, before August 6, be sure to visit the Redux Contemporary Art Center and Melissa Stern’s multimedia exhibition “The Talking Cure,” a collection of sculptures that are only too eager to tell you about the complicated workings of...
Vasari21 Goes to the Movies: Part Two
Photo credits: bottom of page Why watch a documentary about an artist? We have biographies and museum and gallery shows and catalogues and other ways of entering the lives and minds of the more memorable figures in the visual arts. Yet a documentary can offer an...
Jan Marie Sessler
“Not everything has to shout,” Jan Marie Sessler said to me during a studio visit a couple of years ago. And indeed in her prints, paintings, and sculpture she shows a reticence and delicacy that would seem to belong to a bygone era—if not for the wit and spontaneity...
Ripe for Rediscovery: Lee Lozano
Several years ago, ARTnews ran a feature called “Ripe for Rediscovery,” polling curators, artists, and critics about which names had been unfairly lost in the shuffle of art history. Some of those who surfaced—Robert Irwin, Giovanni Boldini, and Rafael...
The “Aha!” Moment, Part Two
More Tales of Accidental Discovery and Enlightenment Legend has it that the great early 20th-century painter Wassily Kandinsky discovered abstraction when he left one of his landscapes positioned upside-down in his studio. He returned the next day and loved the almost...
Kim Levin
Kim Levin is well known to many as an art critic for the Village Voice, New York’s most politically charged alternative tabloid, a post she held for more than 20 years, until 2006. She’s contributed to many art magazines, lectured widely, and written countless...
The “Aha!” Moment, Part One
Artists Share Moments of Discovery A few weeks ago, before making the great trans-Taos trek from Cottam Road to Camino del Monte, I asked Vasari21 members if they had ever experienced what I call the “aha!” moment—a sudden realization that a material, a way of...
Vasari21 Goes to the Movies
The new and already widely praised documentary about Eva Hesse, the subject of our podcast this week with director Marcie Begleiter, brought to mind the many films about artists made down through the years and inspired a mini-marathon of in-home screenings these last...
T.J. Mabrey
T.J. Mabrey’s life has taken her from Oklahoma to Dallas to Panama to the marble quarries of Pietrasanta to Singapore and Cairo and most lately to Taos, NM, where she has a buoyant installation—made almost entirely of paper…
On Confronting the New, the Strange, and the Downright Baffling
It’s become pretty much a cliché to say that there is no such thing as an avant-garde anymore because the term “avant-garde” of necessity implies a notion of beyond the pale, difficult to comprehend, and perhaps provoking a sense of outrage. No sooner does an…
Brian McCutcheon
On the “About” page of Brian McCutcheon’s website appears perhaps one of the scariest artist photos on the Internet. Under his right eye is a lurid green-and-purple bruise, and a few of his teeth seem to have…
Fix That Website!
Toward the end of my interview with curator Tricia Paik of the Indianapolis Museum of Art a few weeks back, we briefly touched on the subject of artist websites—what works and what doesn’t. Developing a good one, up-to-date and easily navigable…
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