Innehållsförteckning för May 2022 från Art & Antiques

ONE OF THE key principles of modernism is that art should be honest, and that in order to do so, it must abandon illusionism. That term can mean many things, but in the context of the 20th century, it refers to creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. That has all sorts of implications, chief among them being that painting should be about paint and canvas, not about constructing an imaginary window onto an equally imaginary world. According to this line of thinking, art goes astray when it tries to recreate what the world looks like to the eye. To emulate the realism of the 19th century would only result in an emotional and even optical falseness. To artists in earlier eras, though, illusionism was nothing to…

LEWALLEN Galleries of Santa Fe, N.M., presents “Dan Christensen: A Painter’s Painter,” featuring the artist’s signature color abstractions. Running through June 4, the show will include works on paper and paintings that Christensen completed between 1967 and 2006. The critic Clement Greenberg referred to Christensen (1942–2007) as “one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.” From a very young age, the Nebraska-born artist met with critical success, showing his work in two Whitney Biennials before he had turned 26. Christensen and his contemporaries—artists such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jules Olitski—pioneered new methods of painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg referred to the work of this group as “post-painterly abstraction.” The goal of the movement was to leave subject matter and…

From May 7–September 5, the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., will present “Drawn from Life: Three Generations of Wyeth Figure Studies,” with many never-before-displayed studio and academic drawings by N.C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth. Representing three generations of the Wyeth family, the drawings shed light on how each artist in this trio developed his ability to render the human form. Victoria Browning Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s granddaughter, serves as guest curator for the exhibition and will offer talks that provide insights from her interviews with her uncle Jamie and her father, art dealer Nicholas Wyeth. N.C.’s sketches include a male nude (Untitled; charcoal on paper) and a standing female nude (Untitled; charcoal or pencil on paper) that date back to around 1900, while Andrew’s work includes several versions of Undercover…

THERE IS A paradoxical connection between realism and unreality that dates back to the beginnings of art. In his Historia Naturalis, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder described a contest between the 5thcentury B.C. artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius to determine who was the greater painter. Zeuxis did a still life of grapes so realistic that birds descended to peck at the painted fruit. Parrhasius, when he was finished with his painting, asked Zeuxis to pull aside the curtain that covered it. When he tried to do so, he discovered that the curtain was actually the painting itself. Parrhasius won, and Zeuxis conceded by saying, “Zeuxis has deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.” To modern sensibilities, the desire to fool viewers may not seem like the most compelling reason…

MARK STEVEN Greenfield brings Black history to life with vivid, symbolic paintings of heroes, freedom fighters, and martyrs. In his vibrantly colorful, folk-art-like images, Greenfield conjures scenes from the lives of his subjects, placing a gold-leaf halo, like the ones in Byzantine paintings, around the head of each one. “I am reimagining what a saint is,” Greenfield says, “maybe in studying their stories, it can inform us on better ways to live.” Through July 2, William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., is presenting a show of Greenfield’s work, aptly titled “Halo.” The figures on view are framed in a circular tondo format mounted on an expansive gold-leaf background. Despite their importance to the African diaspora, Greenfield’s subjects are often little-known to history. One of the least obscure in the…

JAMES YAROSH Associates Fine Art Gallery in Holmdel, N.J., has been mounting exhibitions that give deserved attention to women artists who in their time were largely ignored by the male-dominated art establishment. Currently, Yarosh is presenting “Miriam Beerman—Rediscover: A Retrospective Honoring Miriam Beerman (1923–2022).” Beerman, who died in February at the age of 98, had a six-decade career making figurative, expressionist paintings that champion the cause of victims of oppression, whether in the Holocaust, Hiroshima, or Vietnam. In her paintings, human faces, often contorted with suffering, emerge from a densely layered background in which disparate colors swirl and merge, conveying powerful, disturbing energies. Yarosh, who first saw Beerman’s art in an exhibition at the State Museum in Trenton in 1991, when he was a young artist, and then returned to…

STARTING ON May 27, Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) will present “America’s Epic Treasures featuring Preternatural by Michael Scott,” an exhibition that includes dramatic landscapes by Scott alongside treasures from the museum’s collection. Scott’s beautifully rendered works explore the interplay between nature and science, and, complemented by historic landscape pictures, they are the jumping- off point for a deeper investigation of the natural world. Laura F. Fry, Senior Curator and Curator of Art at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla., writes in the show’s catalogue that Scott works in the tradition of Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole and Thomas Moran. She writes, “Cole and Moran did not intend to merely create pretty pictures of pleasing vistas. They aimed to disrupt ingrained patterns of thinking among Americans, countering the…

WILLIAM KLEIN has pretty much done it all, artistically speaking. He’s mainly known as a photographer—in genres from “street” to journalism, abstraction, and fashion—but has also been a filmmaker—documentary and feature—a TV-commercial producer, a painter, a sculptor, and a book designer. Success in any one of these fields would be enough for most people, but Klein’s multifariousness is driven not by competitiveness but by an overflowing creativity that seeks expression in different forms. A unique graphic vision is discernible throughout all his works, as well as a compassionate, critical eye on the human condition. In his 94th year, Klein is the subject of a full-scale retrospective at the International Center of Photography in New York, opening June 3 and running through September 12. Its title is “William Klein: YES Photographs,…

M.C. ESCHER’S art is both mind-boggling and accessible. This may not be as much of a paradox as it sounds; under the right circumstances, we all like having our minds boggled from time to time. Aside from that, Escher’s unique combination of an Old Master-like printmaking technique and an uncanny ability to make the impossible appear possible accounts for his perennial status as a crowd-pleaser. The only crowd Escher never pleased was the art critics. A “one-man art movement,” he stood outside the mainstream of 20th-century European art, despite the fact that many of his fixations—mathematics as a basis for art, distortion of space, paradox, and the absurd—were shared by many modernists. In particular, the Surrealists tilled some of the same fields as Escher—think of Dalí’s fourth-dimensional experiments and Magritte’s…

Paul Jenkins (1923–2012) liberated the materials of his art in such a way that oil, watercolor, and acrylic paints and canvases became mutable elements for the expression of his expansive life experiences, from his youth in the American Midwest to his transcontinental journeys and years of working abroad. On view at the Tampa Museum of Art, “Paul Jenkins: From America’s Heartland to an International Journey” (through June 26) focuses on the work of a painter whose individual contributions to the language and legacy of Abstract Expressionism situates him alongside the most distinguished artists of the 20th century. Jenkins is one of two artists (the other being Frank Stella) to have been collected in depth by the Jacksonville, Fla., patrons Preston and Joan Haskell. Comprising 25 large-scale paintings and works on…

IN 1965, BRIDGET RILEY was prominently featured in the exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show propelled her to fame, but it also caused some misunderstanding and unfortunately stuck her with the “Op artist” label. Aside from the fact that “Op art” was more a journalistic shorthand than a real art movement, the emphasis on optical effects—and there is no doubt that Riley’s carefully constructed abstractions are both gratifying and challenging to the eye—tends to obscure Riley’s intentions and connections to her artistic predecessors and influences. Born in London in 1931, the daughter of a printing-company owner, Riley was deeply influenced by the work of Georges Seurat when she was just starting out as an artist in the 1950s. Growing up in…