When Lee Krasner Met Piet Mondrian

When Lee Krasner Met Piet Mondrian

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...
Vigée the Victorious

Vigée the Victorious

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...
The Fate of the Art at the Four Seasons

The Fate of the Art at the Four Seasons

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...
Alex Meets Ada

Alex Meets Ada

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,”...
The Secret of Venus

The Secret of Venus

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...
Frank Stella Meets Jasper Johns

Frank Stella Meets Jasper Johns

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...