| | The First Art Newspaper on the Net | | Established in 1996 | Saturday, February 3, 2024 |
| | | A stunningly well-preserved 600-year-old gauntlet is found in Switzerland | |
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An image from Martin Bachmann/Construction Department of the Canton of Zurich shows a 14th-century iron gauntlet found near Kyburg Castle in Switzerland. The gauntlet is far better preserved than other similar artifacts found in the country (Martin Bachmann/Construction Department of the Canton of Zurich via The New York Times)
by Victor Mather
NEW YORK, NY.- A medieval knight returns to a Swiss castle after a victorious battle. With a hearty whoop he tosses aside his prized gauntlets at the blacksmith shop. As he rushes off to a celebratory feast, they sit out of sight in a dark corner. Not too long after, a fire breaks out, the shop is destroyed and the gauntlets are lost for more than 600 years. OK, so maybe it didnât happen that way. But maybe it did. When an astonishingly well preserved piece of armor from so long ago is rediscovered, itâs hard not to speculate a little romantically about its origins. Demolition work near Kyburg Castle, northeast of Zurich, threatened a site that was known to be the location of a medieval town. So a rescue excavation was carried out in the winter of 2021 and early 2022. âWe knew that all the archaeological remains in the ground would be destroyed during this construction work,â said Lorena Burkhardt, the excavation leader. Excavators unearthed ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day The St John's Hospital in Bruges, one of the oldest and best-preserved hospital buildings in Europe, reopened as a completely new, contemporary museum. The new museum is conceived as a place that speaks to the heart, where hospitality - in all senses of the word - and care - through all ages - are central.
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| 'ICP at 50' revels in the power of the image | | A look at the $10 billion design for a new Port Authority bus terminal | | How Maurice Sendak lived with his own wild things |
Gordon Parks, Invisible Man Retreat, Harlem, New York, 1952. International Center of Photography, The LIFE Magazine Collection, 2005 (1606.2005) Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
by Arthur Lubow
NEW YORK, NY.- To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the International Center of Photography has mounted ICP at 50: From the Collection, 1845-2019, a palate-whetting smorgasbord of a show, with 170 pictures that illustrate the history and breadth of the medium, from 19th-century daguerreotypes to 21st-century conceptual art. Wide ranging as it is, the show tilts toward the photojournalistic. Considering the centers origins, thats not surprising. In 1966, photographer Cornell Capa the younger brother of Robert Capa, the preeminent war photojournalist founded the International Fund for Concerned Photography as a traveling museum without a building. In 1974, he transformed it into the International Center of Photography, the first New York museum dedicated to the art. His devotion to concerned photography bucked a trend. In 1967, the Museum of Modern Art staged New Documents, an exhibition that welcomed a new generation of photographers who aime ... More | |
An artist rendering provided by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey shows the final design of the new Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, at 40th Street and 8th Avenue. (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey via The New York Times)
by Patrick McGeehan
NEW YORK, NY.- It has taken a full decade to conceive, but a $10 billion transformation of New York Citys dreary main bus terminal may get rolling in the next few months. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the terminal, unveiled an updated design for its replacement on Thursday. Instead of the dismal, brick hulk that has darkened two full blocks of midtown Manhattan for over 70 years, there would be a bright, modern transit hub topped by two office towers. The bus terminal has become a poster child for a failed infrastructure facility that desperately needs to be replaced, said Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority. Its going to be an extraordinary transformation from a rundown, 1950s-era, outdated facility to one that will be intended to be state of the art. Construction is expected to take eight years, he said, meaning the project could be completed by 2032. Planning was ... More | |
An original wooden toy made by Maurice Sendak and his brother, Jack Sendak, who both tried to sell the item to F.A.O. Schwarz, where Maurice Sendak worked as a window designer before becoming an illustrator, at Sendaks home in Ridgefield, Conn., Jan. 26, 2024. (Peter Fisher/The New York Times)
by Elisabeth Egan
NEW YORK, NY.- On a frigid Wednesday afternoon, sunbeams poured into Maurice Sendaks studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut, crisscrossing one another with the precision and warmth of the childrens books that were born in this room. Sendak died almost 12 years ago, but his studio is exactly as he left it. There are his pencil cups and watercolor sets; theres his final manuscript, for a book called No Noses. And there, glowing like a ripe tomato, is his red cardigan, draped over the back of an empty chair. Standing among Sendaks books, art and ephemera, it was easy to imagine that hed stepped out for his daily 3-mile jaunt down Chestnut Hill Road. Surely hed come back, pop in a Mozart CD and get cracking on a new project. There were his walking sticks by the front door; there were his poster paints, wearing price tags from an art store that closed in 2016. There was his ... More |
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| Hood Museum of Art opens 'Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth' | | 'Photograms' by János Megyik is now opening at the Art Institute of Chicago | | 'Silva Cascadia: Under the Spell of the Forest' at the Museum of Northwest Art |
Hung Liu, Olympia Triptych, 2015. Composition gold leaf, digital transparencies, resin, and hand-painting with lithography ink on panel. Three parts, 41 x 15 1/2, 41 x 60 1/8, 41 x 20 in. Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. © Estate of Hung Liu, photo courtesy of the Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro.
HANOVER, NH.- The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, has initiated the traveling exhibition Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth, from February 8 through June 22, 2024. Including the work of 17 artists in a wide range of media, the exhibition explores the use and significance of gold in artistic expression today. The exhibition was organized by Dr. Emily Stamey, Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon Curator of Academic Programming and Head of Exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro. It features the work of Radcliffe Bailey, Larissa Bates, william cordova, Angela Fraleigh, Gajin Fujita, Nicholas Galanin, Liz Glynn, Shan Goshorn, Sherin Guirguis, Titus Kaphar, Hung Liu, James Nares, Ronny Quevedo, Shinji Turner- ... More | |
János Megyik. Construction (1985), 1989. The Art Institute of Chicago, promised gift of Nadace The Pudil Family Foundation. (detail)
CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago is now showing János Megyik Photograms, on view from February 3 through July 8, 2024. This is the first U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the work of Hungarian sculptor János Megyik, who in the 1980s made a series of extraordinary, large-scale photograms based on his sculptures. For six decades, János Megyik (Hungarian, born 1938) has been making poetic investigations of fractal geometry and perspectival systems, motivated by questions of point, line, plane, volume, and all that lies between and beyond their innumerable intersections. In 1983, following a decade spent building constructions from larch wood, the artist started experimenting with the cameraless technique known as the photogram. Megyik placed objects directly upon photographic paper and then exposed them to light, which darkens the exposed areas and reveals shadow-like images ... More | |
Kimberly Trowbridge, Oracle Tree I, Big Leaf Maple, 2020. Oil on paper panel, 96 x 48 inches.
LA CONNER, WA.- The Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA, presents Silva Cascadia: Under the Spell of the Forest starting as of today. This exhibition features paintings and sculptures by Northwest women artists inspired by forests and trees. From immersive environments to documentary portrayals, from lush expanses of innumerable, layered greens to individual black-and-white winter trees, each expression conveys the subtle, deep presence of these giant entities we often take for granted. This exhibition addresses womens critical role in shaping the discourse around artistic, political, and environmental action vis-a-vis the current ecological concerns for a viable future. Guest curator Kathleen Garrett has put together an outstanding roster of artists: Maria Cristalli, Linda Davidson, Kathleen Faulkner, Patty Haller, Laura Hamje, Hart James, Claire Johnson, Donna Leavitt, Karen Lené Rudd, Juliet Shen, Kimberly Trowbridge, and Suze Woolf ... More |
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| At 200, the Brooklyn Museum looks forward | | Susie Essman, the scene-stealer who makes Larry David lose it | | The mother who gave Springsteen his rock 'n' roll spirit |
The Brooklyn Museum in New York, July 28, 2019. For its bicentennial year, the museum is rolling out a slate of events and exhibitions this fall including an open call for local artists. (Jeenah Moon/The New York Times)
by Ted Loos
NEW YORK, NY.- Later in life, the great poet Walt Whitman recalled the events of the Fourth of July, 1825. At around 6 years old, he wrote, he attended the cornerstone laying ceremony of the Brooklyn Apprentices Library, which had been incorporated a year earlier. The man who later penned Song of Myself said he was proud to have been lifted up into a better viewing position by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat who became a Revolutionary War general and hero, who was on hand to place the cornerstone. The librarys name and mission changed over time, and it started to focus on showing art in the 1840s with Whitman on hand to view and chronicle the exhibitions in his newspaper work and ... More | |
Susie Essman in New York on Jan. 25, 2024. (Caroline Tompkins/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- Comedian Susie Essman spots them regularly, out in the urban wild: fashion doppelgängers. We had barely begun our lunch at Cafe Luxembourg on the Upper West Side in New York City when she leaned in and gestured conspiratorially. Thats a total Susie Greene outfit, she said, spying a woman entering the restaurant in a hooded, salmon-orange jumpsuit crosshatched with mint green slashes. And shes got a leopard-print purse, look at that! She sat back, delighted. Power clashing is the life force of Susie Greene, the singular character that Essman has inhabited on Curb Your Enthusiasm since the HBO series, created by Larry David, began in 2000. There is no one in the entertainment universe who dares to dress like her not just a clash but a dogfight of pattern, color and texture, with a dollop of feather and few who communicate as she does, in an ornery gush of inspired expletives. As ... More | |
Bruce Springsteen performs at Madison Square Garden in New York, April 1, 2023. (Nina Westervelt/The New York Times)
by Jon Pareles
NEW YORK, NY.- Joy and despair, vitality and darkness course through Bruce Springsteens songs. The joy, he told the world, came from his mother, Adele Springsteen, who died Wednesday at 98. When he accepted the Ellis Island Family Heritage award in 2010, Springsteen brought his mother onstage with her sisters, Dora and Eda, and declared, They put the rock n roll in me. Adele, born Adele Zerilli in 1925, was constantly listening to Top 40 radio when Springsteen was growing up, getting her son on his feet to dance with her. She scrimped to buy him his first electric guitar and she encouraged him to be a musician. She worked for decades as a legal secretary, an example that taught her son the dignity and camaraderie of holding a job. Its a sight that Ive never forgotten, my ... More |
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| First solo institutional exhibition in Europe by Doron Langberg brings together new and recent paintings | | 'Studio/Archive' explores power of photography | | Hauser & Wirth spotlights the next generation of artists living and working in the UK |
Mom, 2023. Oil on linen, 61 x 45.7 cm. Private Collection © Doron Langberg. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
ROTTERDAM.- Kunsthal Rotterdam is now presenting the first solo institutional exhibition in Europe by artist Doron Langberg (1985), which started on 1 February 2024. One of the leading figurative painters of his generation, Langberg has gained a reputation for works that celebrate queer subjectivity. Portraying himself, his family, friends, lovers and landscapes, Langbergs luminous and often large-scale paintings celebrate the physicality of touch in subject matter and process. Doron Langberg. Part of Your World brings together sixteen new and recent paintings from intimate portraits to monumental sweeping landscapes which encompass universal subjects of love, desire and place. Many of Langbergs compositions are set in domestic settings or in landscapes that are significant to him, such as the immediate surroundings of his parental home in Israel, or the beach of Fire Island, a queer haven ... More | |
Ja'Tovia Gary, An Ecstatic Experience (still), 2015, video, 16:9, 1920 x 1080, 6 minutes, color and black and white, sound, Tang purchase in partnership with the New Media Arts Consortium, a collaboration of the art museums at Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Colby College, Middlebury College, and Skidmore College.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces Studio/Archive, an exhibition featuring contemporary art from the Tang collection that examines studio portraiture and archives as tools for agency, empathy, and justice. The exhibition runs from February 3, through Sunday, June 19. An opening reception will be Saturday, February 10, at 5 pm. The works on view, many of them recent acquisitions, include nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, vernacular photography, contemporary portraiture, and video. Organized to complement the Tang Museums presentation of Lessons of the Hour by Sir Isaac Julien, this exhibition aims to extend the conversation ... More | |
Victoria Cantons, A Girl, 2023. Oil and linen, 170 x 150 x 3.6 cm / 66 7/8 x 59 x 1 3/8 in. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
LONDON.- Present Tense spotlights the next generation of artists living and working in the UK, from emerging to mid-career, celebrating a breadth of creative talent and socially engaged practices. The multifaceted group presentation consists of 23 contemporary artists outside of the Hauser & Wirth roster, testing the boundaries of their mediums to address and confront notions of identity, consciousness, humanity and representation. Through their individual lens, each artist is responding to the cultural climate of the UK right now, depicting a range of lived experiences that co-exist and connect within the rich fabric of the same location. An extended events and learning program will run alongside the exhibition, engaging with key themes addressed within the galleries and facilitating further dialogue around points of intersection between the artists practices. Featuring ... More |
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Lawrence Langer, unblinking scholar of Holocaust literature, dies at 94
NEW YORK, NY.- Lawrence L. Langer, a literary scholar whose unblinking assessment of the Holocaust as an event so vast and evil that it defies moral framing helped deepen scholarly and popular understanding of the atrocity, died Monday at his home in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He was 94. His son, Andrew Langowitz, said the cause was rectal cancer. Across some 15 books and monographs, Langer insisted on a searing interpretation of the Holocaust as a moral black hole from which not even meaning can escape. He rejected words like survivor, hero, martyr and tragedy when applied to the Holocaust because, he said, they hinted at the possibility of a redemptive silver lining. In the decades after the war, there was pressure to make the Holocaust fit a moral framework, Ruth Franklin, a biographer and literary critic, said ... More
'Not a Pretty Picture': A director's unflinching response to trauma
NEW YORK, NY.- Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidges Not a Pretty Picture is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract. The subject is date rape, and it could not be more topical. In a rare theatrical run, a new 4K restoration of the movie opens Friday at Anthology Film Archives. At 16 years old, in 1962, Coolidge was sexually assaulted by an older schoolmate. Her 1976 movie restages and analyzes the rape. In the film, its 1962 again and the actress playing Martha (Michele Manenti), innocently adventurous, takes a trip with three boys and another girl to New York City. No matter how self-possessed she believes herself to be, she winds up isolated in a loft, where she is cajoled, bullied ... More
The essential Alice Munro
NEW YORK, NY.- Before Id read Alice Munro when my knowledge of her amounted to an oafish word cloud (older woman, Canadian, short stories) I imagined that the experience of reading her books, if I ever bothered to, would be like listening to classical music on fancy headphones in a college library: civilized, subtle, probably sleep-inducing. But then I actually read Munro, and she lifted off my headphones in order to whisper an insane, unforgettable piece of gossip about that anxiety-stricken TA over by the copy machine. It turns out that Alice Munro Nobel laureate, Author Most Likely to Endure, object of universal writerly reverence and envy is not just important, but fun. Her books dont belong on a high shelf; they belong in the passenger seat of your car, in the tote bag you bring to the grocery store. She ... More
'These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture' at Royal West of England Academy
BRISTOL .- A new exhibition opening at the Royal West of England Academy presents an extremely rare and largely unknown aspect of the late artist John Hoylands (1934-2011) career ceramic sculptures. In 1994, Hoyland a prominent British abstract painter - made an unruly group of twenty-five ceramic sculptures. Loaded with colour, humour and zoomorphic qualities, he called them these mad little hybrids, referring to their unexpectedness and the difficulty of fitting them into conventional categories. Remarkably, they have never been publicly displayed since being made. Hoylands ceramics now appear remarkably contemporary and completely in sync with a broad range of current sculpture. To emphasise this, the exhibition brings eleven of Hoylands ceramics together with sculpture by Caroline Achaintre (b.1969), ... More
Artwork of Nanna Hänninen focuses on current environmental issues that affect global communities
BERLIN.- Persons Projects has opened Nanna Hänninens exhibition Vanishing Views. In the selected works, Hänninen focuses on current environmental issues that affect global communities, while intrinsically warning all of a future that is fast approaching. Her minimalist work conceptually challenges our perceptions of climate change by exploring through photography the gradual disappearance of uniquely diverse ecosystems. Exploring these impacts, Hänninen combines different, seemingly detached objects and places. In merging these factors together, the artist has found her own way to visually address the urgency of climate protection. Nanna Hänninens photographs have, for over two decades, challenged our perceptions of reality by creating visual dichotomies. Having played a pivotal role within the Helsinki School since ... More
Across mediums Austin Eddy's work is of multiple minds speaking in a rhythmic unison
VIENNA.- Galerie Eva Presenhuber is now showing Songs For The Sun., the gallerys first exhibition with the US-American artist Austin Eddy. Across mediums Eddys work is of multiple minds speaking in a rhythmic unison. Abstraction coalesces into figuration, as shapes become images and images shapes. Texture becomes a material contradiction and the illusionistic warping of viewers expectations. It all fits firmly in the tradition of modernism, renewing it a century later while simultaneously breaking it apart. That high art purity melding with an interest in and celebration of more vernacular pursuits. Quilting, collage, the flattened perspectives of rural folk painting that invent ways of depicting landscape and narrative away from classical representational and cinematic models of storytelling. The work manages to maintain a connection with early ... More
Exploring the lasting impact of the work of Sir William Gillies in 'After Gillies' at Royal Scottish Academy
EDINBURGH.- The Royal Scottish Academy is showing After Gillies, an exhibition exploring the lasting impact of the work of Sir William Gillies on the current membership of the Royal Scottish Academy. Upon his death in 1973, William Gillies RSA RA (1898-1973) bequeathed his entire estate to the RSA. This generous bequest, comprising hundreds of artworks, materials, archives, and more, has allowed the RSA to perpetuate Gillies legacy through research, publications and exhibitions. Today, the bequest continues to fuel various initiatives, such as the RSA New Contemporaries Prize, £2,000 for an emerging artist; the Sir William Gillies Memorial Lecture, bringing influential and educational speakers to the RSA each year; and the annual Gillies Bursary, a fund to support projects by members of the RSA. Notably, the Gillies ... More
For Thomas Hirschhorn, handmade art keeps us human
NEW YORK, NY.- Gladstone Gallery looks like a war zone, the aftermath of a Call of Duty gaming session gone bad, the virtual gunmen downing Red Bull and chain smoking over their keyboards, until a bomb came through the roof. This is the tragicomic scene summoned in cardboard and packing tape by Thomas Hirschhorn, 66, a Swiss artist known since the 90s for wrestling humble materials into cacophonous installations: rows of PCs and desks, a ceiling festooned with smiley-face and purple devil emoji dangling from ropes of tape, and life-size cutouts of geared-up video game soldiers. Energy drink cans made of tinfoil and mounds of cigarettes fashioned from plastic foam litter the paper desktops. The cardboard monitors, many of them spiderwebbed with cuts, sport color printouts of screenshots from first-person shooters and photos ... More
Whose last show is it, anyway?
NEW YORK, NY.- Outside the big, tall windows of Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimets Manhattan loft, in a former garment factory on Mercer Street in SoHo, is a slice of the New York skyline: up close, rooftops of old brick buildings, solid as can be; farther off, glass towers taller, sleeker, colder, newer. In a city forever in flux, Maddow, 75, and Zimet, 81, have stayed put for half a century, creating experimental theater in the skylighted boho oasis that cost $7,000 to buy in 1973 and where they raised their family. Having arrived in the neighborhood when it was scary-scruffy, long before it went way upscale, they have remained stubbornly devoted to each other and to their venerably niche downtown company, Talking Band, which turns 50 this year. That kind of history can sound utopian from the outside. But misunderstanding is a risk theyre taking, ... More
Jennell Jaquays, who unlocked fantasy dungeons for gamers, dies at 67
NEW YORK, NY.- Jennell Jaquays, who made luminous fantasy paintings, classic adventures for tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and distinctive levels in popular video games such as Quake II, died Jan. 10 in Dallas. She was 67. Jaquays wife, Rebecca Heineman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome. During Jaquays lengthy career, gaming grew from a niche hobby into a cultural touchstone. But long before Dungeons & Dragons was adapted into hit video games such as Baldurs Gate 3 and films such as Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and before it served as a signifier of nerdiness on television shows including Stranger Things, The Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons, devotees shared the adventures they created with other hobbyists. Jaquays ... More
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Flashback On a day like today, Swedish-American mathematician Arne Beurling was born February 03, 1905. Arne Carl-August Beurling (3 February 1905 - 20 November 1986) was a Swedish mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University (1937–1954) and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras, e.g. Håkan Hedenmalm's factorization theorem for Bergman spaces. He is perhaps most famous for single-handedly deciphering an early version of the German cipher machine Siemens and Halske T52 in a matter of two weeks during 1940, using only pen and paper. This machine's cipher is generally considered to be more complicated than that of more famous Enigma machine.
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