Know Your Critics: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do?

Known for his support of “action painters”—his term for the Abstract Expressionists—Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was, along with Clement Greenberg, at the center of mid-century American art criticism. Together, these two critics developed the vocabulary and analytic tools to understand Abstract Expressionism, and to explain its advancements to the rest of the world. There was, however, a catch: […]

Know Your Critics: What Did Clement Greenberg Do?

Possibly the most renowned art critic in American history, Clement Greenberg (1904-1994) held sway for years in the postwar period over not only the popular perception of contemporary art being made in this country but also how the artists themselves thought about it and brought it into being in their studios. While his reign eventually came to […]

The top 10 artworks of the 20th century

From Picasso’s formidable whores and Magritte’s provocative pipe to Pollock painting like and angel, the best 20th-centrury art reflects a world of flux, abstraction and imagination. The century was not yet out of its teens. For most of the small minority aware of the experiments of modern art, the bright colours of Matisse were still […]

The History of the Found Object in Art

Tracey Emin‘s sculpture My Bed (1998) is exactly what it sounds like: the work consists of the artist’s freshly slept-in bed, with crumpled pillows, disheveled sheets, and dirty tissues and other junk (including sanitary items, prophylactics, and liquor bottles) strewn around the footboard. When it debuted at 1999 at London’s Tate, it created an instant commotion in the […]

Indictment Details How to Forge a Masterpiece

The painting caught Pei-Shen Qian’s eye, but it was the price that affected him deeply. Mr. Qian, browsing in a booth at a Manhattan art show a decade ago, had stumbled across his own work: a forgery of a modern masterpiece that he had recently completed. He had sold it for just a few hundred […]

The 10 greatest works of art ever

From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?

10 American paintings before Pollock

Did American painting exist before Abstract Expressionism? Not such a daft question if we don’t get to see any of it. Many will still argue that American painting before mid-century, with just a few exceptions, is really too derivative, too backward-looking to get excited about, and that it was photography that American artists really excelled […]