Connecting Artists

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...

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...

After eight posts about drawings, it’s challenging to come up anything new to say about the medium, but if the materials remain largely the same, the circumstances for artists everywhere have changed dramatically in the last year. Many of the members included here...

Deep in the heart of Bushwick, Michael David's residencies offer an intense experience that may take your art to new levels.  “A cross between Black Mountain and Project Runway” is the way Michael David sums up the residencies he’s been sponsoring about four times a...

Artists report on nocturnal inspirations and frustrations I once described Louise Bourgeois as having “a direct pipeline to her unconscious,” and that still seems a fitting description for an artist who came of age in Paris at a time when the Surrealists were the...

Even the Most Respected Critics Change Their Minds When a politician flip-flops on a position, the public and press alike are quick to cry foul, hurling accusations of bad faith or pandering. But when an art critic changes his or her mind, the ripple effect is likely...

Without my four sons, I would be a different artist. They were born one right after the other—the oldest was four when the fourth was born—simplifying as many complications as were created. I dearly wanted a family, and knew…

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...

In newsletters, I’ve touched on the way artists respond to catastrophe—specifically war and widespread disease—from the Middle Ages to the present. Some, like Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, may take decades for the horror of their times to percolate into their...

Those calling the shots in the art world can be astonishingly cruel. Sculptor Stan Smokler, who maintains studios in New York and Pennsylvania, recalls sending out slides in the early days of his career…