Georg Baselitz Celebrates His 80th Birthday With a Berlin Gallery Show Packed With Museum Masterpieces

Why It’s Worth a Look: Marking the artist’s 80th birthday, this exhibition brings together significant works loaned from institutions and private collections, spanning the breadth of Baselitz’s long career. One of Germany’s most significant and celebrated artists, Baselitz is a part of a generation of artists that reinvented German painting in an era that was struggling […]

Jasper Johns Still Doesn’t Want to Explain His Art

LOS ANGELES — Not long ago, Jasper Johns, who is now 87 and widely regarded as America’s foremost living artist, was reminiscing about his childhood in small-town South Carolina. One day when he was in the second grade, a classmate named Lottie Lou Oswald misbehaved and was summoned to the front of the room. As […]

The Artist Who Invented the Upside-Down Painting

The market is on the up for Georg Baselitz, one of the world’s greatest-living painters, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year Expelled from art school aged 18, Georg Baselitz has gained a reputation as a provocateur, creating works that cause scandal and turn conventional approaches to painting, quite literally, on their head. Baselitz’s 80th birthday in January […]

Shock of the Nude

Turning bodies into paint brushes, Carolee Schneemann’s performances, films and art still startle, as a retrospective at MoMA PS1 shows. Some people in the art world say that #MeToo has gone too far. What modern misogynist will be yanked from museums next? Gauguin? Picasso? I say, sure, why not? Let’s set them aside for awhile, […]

Georg Baselitz, upside-down artist of international renown, at 80

Georg Baselitz was thrown out of art school at the age of 18 because of his love for Picasso, and he has remained controversial and provocative ever since. To mark his 80th birthday, DW looks back at his life and work. When a young and up-and-coming artist is kicked out of an art academy, that […]

Should Museums Be Allowed to Sell Donated Works of Art?

Pity the big-time art collector (really!). All that time and money building a collection of art that is apt to go away just before or just after the collector dies. Because, when planning their estates, the three typical options for them are: The art can be willed to heirs who, if they like their parent’s […]

The Artist Questioning Authorship

With ready-made materials and artifacts, Danh Vo’s art recasts the historical events and political ideas that have shaped his world. Danh Vo had just started to gain recognition as a rising young artist when he decided, in 2010, to make a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. He had been offered a one-man show at the Fridericianum, a […]

Fondation Beyeler opens retrospective of the work of German artist Georg Baselitz

The focus of the exhibition is on Baselitz as an artist who is deeply rooted in the history of European and American painting, and who is seen as the originator of an outstandingly inventive pictorial language.   The Fondation Beyeler is devoting its first exhibition in 2018 to the German painter, printmaker and sculptor Georg Baselitz […]

Conceptual Artist Jill Magid Wins the 2017 Calder Prize—and the Keys to Alexander Calder’s Home

Magid will receive $50,000 cash and a residency at Calder’s former home and studio in Connecticut. The Calder Foundation announced today that the New York-based artist Jill Magid has won the 2017 Calder Prize. The award comes with $50,000 cash and the promise to place one of the artist’s works in a major public collection. […]

The Director of the Beyeler Foundation Promises to Break Its ‘Glass Ceiling’—After Baselitz and Balthus Shows

Sam Keller says that Switzerland’s most-visited art museum will show more female artists as it expands on its 20th anniversary. In just over 20 years, the Fondation Beyeler has become Switzerland’s most-visited art gallery. And it is growing, in both ambition and size. The Beyeler’s director, Sam Keller, is overseeing the forthcoming $100 million Peter Zumthor-designed expansion, which […]

What Happened After Mexico’s Greatest Architect Was Turned Into a Diamond

On April 27th, more than a hundred people gathered in the underground auditorium of a prestigious contemporary-art museum in Mexico City. Those who couldn’t find seats lingered outside, watching a live video feed of what was transpiring within; more than seventy thousand others streamed the proceedings at home. For almost two hours, the audience looked on […]

Here Are the 15 Biggest Art-World Controversies of 2017

From Dana Schutz’s notorious painting to divisive animal art at the Guggenheim, 2017 was chock full of debate, discussion, and protest. This year saw unprecedented tumult in the real world—and in the art world, too. There were fiery debates over cultural appropriation and the definition of censorship; a legal tussle over deaccessioning at the Berkshire […]

Homage to Mexico: Josef Albers and His Reality-Based Abstraction

A radiant Guggenheim exhibition grounds the proto-Minimalist abstract paintings of Josef Albers in the geometric grandeur of Mesoamerican monuments. Art rarely thrives in a vacuum. It is by definition polyglot and in flux, buffeted by the movement of art objects, goods and people across borders and among cultures, and also by individual passion. This much, […]

How One Obscure David Hockney Painting Encapsulates the Greatness of His Work

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big, popular David Hockney retrospective is more than worth your time. As far as I can tell, however, what it reveals is that the conventional opinion of the beloved British painter is basically the right one. His most famous works are also his best works, specifically the late-1960s, early-‘70s cycle making of […]

The Hirshhorn and Beyeler Join Forces to Stage a Georg Baselitz Survey—Naked Man and All

The Swiss-US retrospective will include early painting that shocked 1960s Germany, plus “exuberant and explosive” late works. Georg Baselitz will get a US-Swiss retrospective next year co-organized by the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, and Fondation Beyeler, near Basel. The show is set to kick off at the private museum in Switzerland on January 21—two days before […]

The Evolution of Art, Part II: From Minimalism Until Now

How did we get to where we are today in the realm of fine art? Who were the artists that changed the course of art history and what were the artworks that broke the mold? In Part I of this two-part series we described the advances in Modern art starting with the advent of abstraction and ending […]

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (Linda Nochlin, From 1971)

Implications of the Women’s Lib movement for art history and for the contemporary art scene—or, silly questions deserve long answers. A version of this story originally appeared in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews. While the recent upsurge of feminist activity in this country has indeed been a liberating one, its force has been chiefly emotional—personal, […]

Coming Face to Face With Jimmie Durham

The sculptor’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum is a “brilliant, half-century-long act of politically driven self-invention,” our critic writes. “I feel fairly sure that I could address the entire world if only I had a place to stand,” the peripatetic American artist Jimmie Durham said in the 1980s. Now he has that place: the fifth […]