Two decades before he was interred beneath a stark tombstone, the artist Andrew Wyeth imagined his own funeral. In about fifty drawings from the early 90s known as the “Funeral Group,” he sketched family and friends gathered around a coffin containing his supine corpse.
Art Galleries & Museums
“New York: 1962-1964” is a celebration of the institution hosting it. The Jewish Museum has been a venerable fixture in New York’s cultural firmament for what seems like forever, but six decades ago, under the directorship of Alan Solomon, it was the premier incubator for cutting-edge art when NYC was its undisputed center.
The curators set a welcome stage for the visitor to the Center. Greeting them at the entrance is Martin Sharp’s Blowing in the Mind/Mister Tambourine Man (1968). Sharp is known as the mastermind behind posters and album covers for some of the biggest names in ’60s rock and roll history.
The Benin Bronzes of Nigeria, their provenance, and the possibility of restitution have been making headlines of late. Currently scattered across the world, this collection of a thousand plus statues and plaques was stolen in 1897 from the African Kingdom of Benin, modern-day Nigeria, by British troops.
Fresh off its survey of Faith Ringgold, the New Museum presents a retrospective of another veteran African American painter whose aesthetic DNA courses through subsequent generations of black artists. “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” is the artist’s first museum outing since 1989.
Sightings of Barbara Kruger’s work in New York City have been somewhat scarce since her last exhibition in 2018 at Mary Boone Gallery (which permanently closed after its namesake owner went to jail for tax evasion), but now, Kruger is back in a big way with concurrent offerings at David Zwirner and MoMA.
Biography necessarily runs hand in hand with visual-art production. For sculptor and conceptual artist Russell Maltz, living and making are one and the same thing. That said, the affable, unpretentious, and uncontrived sixty-nine-year-old artist wears his penchants, quirks, and opinions lightly, layering them in such a way as always to seem impromptu and so grab an audience’s attention in unexpected ways. In fact, layering would seem to be one of Maltz’s signature activities.
A new self-portrait from Vincent Van Gogh has recently been detected, hidden under layers of glue and cardboard, by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS). Officials are confident, though not certain, that the painting is a hitherto unknown work of art.
The recent publication Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800, a companion catalogue for a show of the same name and the first comprehensive study of LACMA's notable holdings of Spanish American art, is a remarkable and important piece of work.
Linda Nochlin caused a stir when she published, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in 1971. Turning the conventional wisdom of the title on its head, she clarifies that there have always been great women artists, they've just been written out of the record by men.
