America After the Fall review – upheaval in the home of the brave

Royal Academy, London Dance marathons, dustbowl farms, brawling sailors, impoverished cotton-pickers … Adrian Searle takes a journey through 1930s America in a gripping show. The sedan careers up the hill on a country road, slewing as a truck comes over the rise. We have a death’s-eye view, watching it happen. Everything slows down – a […]

What to Make of MoMA’s Stand on Trump’s Travel Ban

This week, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) rehung its prized Modern galleries, swapping out works by greats like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso for works by artists from the Muslim-majority countries affected by President Trump’s travel ban. It’s not exactly as if MoMA has draped itself in a “Muslim Lives Matter” banner. Still, this rapid response, […]

In Elegant Reposte to Trump’s Travel Order, MoMA Installs Works by Artists from Banned Muslim Countries

Less than a week after President Trump signed an executive order banning citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has responded by installing a dozen works by artists from those countries, including the late Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, the Sudanese master Ibrahim El-Salahi, and the young Iranian […]

Want to Donate Your Collection to a Museum? Read This First

‘Tis the season to give charitable donations—for tax reasons as much as philanthropic ones. But it’s not always simple to give an artwork or an art collection to a museum. For most art museums, receiving donations of objects is relatively easy. The person making the gift turns over the items along with “a deed of gift, transferring […]

How the artist Robert Rauschenberg got his goat

Swedish conservators allow Monogram to travel to London, New York and San Francisco for a major traveling survey. When the US artist and animal lover Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) saw a stuffed Angora goat in the window of a junk shop near his New York studio in 1955, he knew he had to have it. The […]

MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

When the influential Museum of Modern Art curator Laura Hoptman claims that she’s “a painting person,” it’s no joke. A veteran organizer of cutting-edge exhibitions, she built her career in part through her insistence on championing the medium, even—or perhaps especially—through its perennial periods of unpopularity and critical disdain. This has earned her both accolades and […]

Talk – Collecting Contemporary Art, Audain Art Museum, Whistler, Canada

Laing Brown is an art collector who is interested in ideas. Brown, chair of the Audain Art Museum acquisitions committee and an external advisor to the acquisitions committee of the National Gallery of Canada, has just returned from Britain, where he went to check out Frieze London, where 160 of the world’s top commercial galleries […]

Public Talk: Collecting Contemporary Art

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” – Sir Winston Churchill Join Laing Brown, a noted art collector, Board Member and Chair of the Audain Art Museum Acquisitions Committee, for a public multi-media presentation where he will discuss his Top 10 Collecting Rules for contemporary […]

How Abstract Expressionism changed modern art

What did the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism do so differently? And how is their work still relevant today? As the first survey of Abstract Expressionism for nearly 60 years is staged in Britain, co-curator David Anfam answers key questions. 1. How was Abstract Expressionism different to what came before? Crucially Abstract Expressionism, or ‘Ab […]

Apocalyps Now: MoMA’s Bruce Connor’s Show is Mind-Blowingly Good

The Museum of Modern Art has wisely advertised its Bruce Conner retrospectivewith an image of Bombhead, a 1989/2002 print in which an army general’s head is replaced with a mushroom cloud. This is a show that promises to blow your mind, and it lives up to that threat. Trippy, disturbing, entertaining, and whimsical all at […]

What Was Abstract Expressionism? A Paint-Splattered Primer on America’s First Major Art Movement

You don’t need to be an art insider to hear the term “Abstract Expressionists” used to describe the inspiration behind all manner of contemporary painting, but what was the original movement all about? Hint: it’s more than just Jackson Pollock drinking and tossing paint on a canvas. In this brief essay from Phaidon’s Art in Time: […]

How I became the bomb – Ulay, Oh (Music Video)

When I first saw the vid of the reunion of the two artists Marina Ambramovic and Frank Uwe Laysiepen aka ‘Ulay’ after 33 years of being apart, I was so touched by how they look at each other eyes and you can tell that true love never dies. 🙂 Watch the Video – Click Here. […]

MoMA breathes life into Bruce Conner’s gas chamber sculpture

The haunting work titled CHILD goes on show in New York after two decades away from the public eye. Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead […]

Installation of Richard Serra’s Sculpture “Sequence” @ SFMoMA

Follow Richard Serra’s to it recent installation at SF MoMA. Watch the video – make it BIG and turn on the volume.

Can a Giant New Museum Make San Francisco an Art Capital?

If you build it, they will come. Or that’s what the board at the San Francisco Museum of Art is betting on. This week, the 81-year-old institution opens its doors after a three-year renovation, gifting the West Coast with a world-class collection that would make MoMA blush. Sure, you can see Richard Serra in New […]

American Beauty: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Case of the Missing Flag

Robert Rauschenberg kept only one major example of his earliest, most influential body of work, the Combine paintings he made between 1954 and 1961. Short Circuit (1955) is similar to other works from the period; it incorporates sculptural elements with both painting and drawing and combines abstraction with images and objects plucked from the young […]

Lessons in Gigantism: Richard Serra Makes It Work

There’s never a shortage of mega-art in Chelsea: a stroll one morning this week encountered such gallery-filling works as Jordan Wolfson’s deranged, chain-operated marionette (“Colored sculpture,” 2016) at David Zwirner and Anish Kapoor’s mammoth, packed-earth “She Wolf” (2016) at Gladstone. And then there’s Richard Serra, whose double-gallery blowout at Gagosian is Exhibit A for material-intensity-meets-overwhelming-scale. […]

Marcel Broodthaers’s Fraught Relationship with Words

Do words limit our experience of a given artwork? Gustave Flaubert believed that, “Explaining one artistic form by means of another is a monstrosity.” Art critic John Bergerwrote: “When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision.” And what if the words are in the art? Expressed by the artist herself? From Cubism to […]

The Met and the Now

America’s preëminent museum finally embraces contemporary art. Gertrude Stein’s famous remark that “you can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both” sounds archaic today. Every self-respecting urban center has its museum of modern art, and climate-change-denying business leaders will spend lavishly to get their name on its walls. The […]

Clyfford Still’s Radical Repetitions

DENVER — The current exhibition at the Clyfford Still Museum (CSM), Repeat/Recreate, has been on the institution’s wish list for nearly 10 years, since well before it even opened. The museum controls 94% of Clyfford Still’s life’s work, yet the show required 12 lenders to gather pairs and triplicates for their first public display together. The result […]