by Ann Landi | Aug 26, 2018 | Did You Know?
Can you picture the austere Dutch modernist dancing barefoot? “Critic Clement Greenberg would describe Mondrian’s work as ‘passion mastered and cooled,’ and that described the artist as well. He had set up his studio in a Victorian house with curved arches, but in...
by Ann Landi | Feb 14, 2016 | Did You Know?
Vigée the Victorious The life of the beautiful, clever, and prodigiously gifted Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) is one of those rags-to-riches sagas irresistible to storytellers of any era. She was born in Paris to a minor portraitist and a hairdresser, but...
by Ann Landi | Feb 1, 2016 | Did You Know?
The Fate of the Art at the Four Seasons By Ann Landi Over the holidays, I learned from a friend that the venerable Four Seasons Restaurant in the landmark Seagram Building on Park Avenue would be closing this summer. I was a little late to that news, and it is not...
by Ann Landi | Jan 13, 2016 | Did You Know?
Alex Meets Ada Alex Katz first met his wife, Ada, at an opening at the Tangier Gallery in 1958. She immediately became one of his favorite models. “I’d been painting these all-over landscapes, and then I decided to paint details like eyes and noses and mouths,”...
by Ann Landi | Dec 22, 2015 | Did You Know?
The Secret of Venus Seeing Mona Kuhn’s subtly erotic nudes in the slide show that accompanies our podcast with her this week (and especially the photo titled Morgane from 2010) made me think of a book proposal I worked on more than a decade ago. I had...
by Ann Landi | Dec 11, 2015 | Did You Know?
Frank Stella Meets Jasper Johns “The artist who launched Minimalism was Frank Stella (b. 1936), who was still a student at Princeton when he saw Jasper Johns’s 1958 show at Leo Castelli Gallery. He liked the repetition of the flags, so many stars, so many...
