Art in America articles from July 2002

Art in America archives from July 2002

Hoodwinked by Hockney? (Letters).
July 1, 2002... To the Editors: As one of the two scientists at the December "Art and Optics" symposium who analyzed (and rejected) David Hockney's bold theory on the use of optical devices by old masters, I consider David L. Sweet's review of Secret...

Talent, not tracing. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... To the Editors: David L. Sweet may have been a little lenient toward David Hockney's thought-provoking but misconceived theory. Ingres's sketches show that he worked by trial and error. None of his sitters ever mentioned his...

Hockney's optical delusions. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... To the Editors: David L. Sweet rightly points out the incoherence of David Hockney's theory. I don't want to diminish Andy Warhol's accomplishment as an artist, but comparing him to Ingres is absurd. There is a fine but crucial difference...

WTC perimeter plans. (Front Page).(Beyer Blinder Belle to consult on World Trade Center site; first stages involve construction of fence)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The appointment in May of Beyer Blinder Belle as the lead consulting firm for design development, planning and rebuilding at the World Trade Center site marks the beginning of a lengthy and complex process of urban redevelopment. As this issue...

Bold new library for Brooklyn. (Front Page).(Brooklyn Public Library plans for Visual and Performing Arts Library to be designed by Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) recently announced plans for the construction of the city's first Visual and Performing Arts Library. Mexico City-based Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos has been selected to design the distinctive new...

Subtle sounds in Times Square. (Front Page).(Max Neuhaus sound-art piece)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In late May, a sound-art piece by Max Neuhaus was reinstalled in Times Square, a seemingly odd location for a work whose subtle tones are easy to miss in the constant bustle and din of traffic. Sited under a subway ventilation grate at the...

Summer art getaway. (Front Page).(Brewster, N.Y. art festival)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... While the New York City art world is in the summer doldrums, die-hard art lovers can head to Brewster, N.Y., an easy one-hour train ride from Manhattan, to get their art fix. The second annual Brewster Project is set to take place on July 27...

New hotel art fair for NYC. (Front Page).(at Gershwin Hotel)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... A new art fair focusing on emerging artists took place at New York's Gershwin Hotel this spring. Called the Scope Art Fair, it featured 28 exhibitors who presented art works in bedrooms and bathrooms throughout the hotel's top three floors. In...

Art world optimism follows strong spring sales. (Front Page).(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2002... In spite of an uncertain U.S. economy, business was booming at the big New York auctions this spring. Totals for the biannual, two-week-long period of sales at the three major auction houses met or exceeded expectations, as customers packed the...

Art's summer place.(Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach; Lee and Elaine)
July 1, 2002... Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach, by Helen A. Harrison and Constance Ayers Denne, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2002; 176 pages, $40. Lee and Elaine, by Ann Rower, London, Serpent's Tail, 2002; 256...

Saving Cezanne's studio: the author recalls his youthful efforts to preserve Cezanne's final studio in Aix-en-Provence, and the disillusion that followed his successful campaign. (Memoir).
July 1, 2002... When for the first time I came to Aix-en-Provence on Monday, Sept. 13, 1950, I was seized at once by a sense of unique enchantment destined to last a lifetime. To those who know the place, I need not explain why, and to those who don't, I can...

The borderless Baroque: a traveling exhibition examines the scope and sensibility of what its curators call "post-Latin American" art. (Import/Export).
July 1, 2002... The austerity esthetic of post-Sept. 11 art (which wanes with each passing day) was preceded by one of the most elaborate, over-the-top trends in recent art history. In an essay published in the New York Times on Jan. 2, 2000, Museum of Modern...

Out of the bunker: a recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum examined the use of Nazi imagery in contemporary art. The show was controversial, artistically uneven and thought-provoking. (Issues & Commentary).
July 1, 2002... It's been a long time since the word "evil" came so easily to the tongues of American politicians and pundits as it does these days. For decades, in part because of the lingering effects of the Vietnam debacle, it was nearly impossible for...

Sin city sampler: in a kind of postscript to Site Santa Fe, critic and curator Dave Hickey chose 14 works by his former students for a show keyed to the art and artifice of Las Vegas. (Report From Santa Fe).
July 1, 2002... Critic and curator Dave Hickey has devoted a lot of time to the subjects of beauty and pleasure, their repercussions, and related musings specific to Las Vegas, where he lives. In recent years, that city (the fastest growing in the U.S.) has...

The many lives of Asger Jorn: prompted by two recent European shows, the author examines Jorn's career, which encompassed primitivist figuration, experiments in ceramics, a founding role in both CoBrA and the Situationist International, and a mixed reception in the United States.
July 1, 2002... Late in 1962, Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-1973) mounted an exhibition of his recent paintings at the Lefebre Gallery in New York. Already well-known in Europe for his expressionist canvases in which archetypal presences (animals, humans,...

Spoerri's habitat: the subject of two recent European retrospectives, Daniel Spoerri has been making art from mealtime leftovers, flea-market finds and commercial transactions since the late 1950s.
July 1, 2002... During his first visit to America in 1964, Daniel Spoerri, one of the most innovative European avant-garde artists to emerge in the 1960s, debuted at New York's Allan Stone Gallery with an exhibition titled "31 Variations on a Meal." In the...

Metropolitan master: John Koch: a self-taught painter with a penchant for the European grand tradition, Koch chronicled an exceptionally graceful form of New York life. In the subtle studio interiors and domestic scenes assembled for a recent 40-year retrospective, his knack for intimate disclosure is counterbalanced by an unbreachable code of restraint.
July 1, 2002... The painter John Koch was one of those precious New York resources that, like Mary Elizabeth's restaurant on 37th street, the Parke-Bernet sales rooms on Madison Avenue and the swimming pool of the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, mostly...

The painting game: for her first New York solo in five years, Susan Rothenberg premiered a group of highly kinetic, often game-based images completed since her 1999 retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
July 1, 2002... Susan Rothenberg likes to take long walks, usually hiking a couple of hours through the New Mexico desert each day. Her sensibility has always been tactile, but in the dozen years that she has spent living in the Southwest, it has become more...

Lichtenstein: seeing is believing: at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, a recent exhibition--replete with visually cunning paintings, works on paper and sculptures--examined Roy Lichtenstein's career-long preoccupation with spatial illusions and the science of perception.
July 1, 2002... One of the central works in the exhibition "Roy Lichtenstein: Inside/Outside," recently presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami, was a cutout image of a suburban house made of painted wood. The prominence of the piece...

Covering all the bases: two views: a pair of revealing gallery shows highlighted different aspects of Roy Lichtensteins obsession with the hidden history of visual images.
July 1, 2002... Last fall, a pair of Lichtenstein exhibitions went on view at two New York galleries. One show was stark, the other was lush, as if to remind us that here is an artist who made an esthetic principle of covering all the bases. "Roy Lichtenstein:...

Baring the truth: known for her energetic videotaped performances parodying the excesses of the art world, Andrea Fraser recently presented new works in which she lampoons an art-awards ceremony, impersonates a drunken German artist and has an erotic encounter with the Guggenheim Bilbao.
July 1, 2002... "What do I, as an artist, provide? What do I satisfy?" are the opening remarks of one of the characters in Andrea Fraser's tour-de-force video Official Welcome (2001). Taped during a live performance at the home of the private collectors who...

Saint Clair Cemin at Cheim & Read. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The term "postmodern" has fallen into disrepute of late, and Saint Clair Cemin's witty sculptures, often described as quintessential exemplars of that movement, deserve better. Abjuring both formal and material purity, he mingles references to...

Georg Baselitz at Michael Werner. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... One of two rough-hewn sculptures raised on simple pedestals, Georg Baselitz's towering Asian Thing (1995) seemed emblematic of the power and vulnerability of the human form at its most Gothic, a golem in the making. Its surfaces are covered...

Bryan Crockett at Lehmann Maupin. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Absorbed with the ethical implications of transgenics--the purposeful creation of hybrids by transplanting genetic material across species--Bryan Crockett offered a suite of macabre, admonitory sculptures representing newborn mice that might...

Philip Pavia at Broome Street. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... This exhibition focused on two groups of recent medium-size, abstract works by veteran New York sculptor Philip Pavia. Six "Freefall Temple" pieces featured carefully arranged marble blocks. Four "Freefall Image" sculptures were made of...

Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz at PaceWildenstein. (New York).
July 1, 2002... The sound of tinny radios playing a subdued sequence of antiquated songs seeped through the gallery like fog, and bicycles were scattered along the pylon moorings of a canal. These were part of Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz's massive...

Simon Starling at Casey Kaplan. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... For his first solo exhibition in New York, Glaswegian Simon Starling assembled scale models of a standard housing type and a brace of parakeets, among other elements, to explore the modernist modular systems of two Austrian emigres, the...

Alan Suicide at Deitch Projects. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Hindsight suggests that at the time of their conception in the early 1970s, there wasn't much distance between the radical, electric thrashing of Alan Vega and Marty Rev of the seminal punk duo Suicide, and the funky light sculptures made by...

Neil Jenney at Alexander and Bonin. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In the late 1960s, before he came to be identified as a pioneer of the style of crude brushwork and apparently naive imagery dubbed "Bad Painting," Neil Jenney created a series of influential sculptures that participated in dismantling many of...

Cecily Brown at Gagosian. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In Cecily Brown's new paintings, throngs of bacchanalian bunnies invade pastoral settings rendered with such heavily worked and frenetic brush-strokes that individual details are almost completely subordinated to an allover abstract effect. The...

Matthew Monahan and Georg Herold at Anton Kern. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The nine monumental charcoal drawings on view in Matthew Monahan's recent show could be called landscapes, however notionally. They are replete with rocky crags, waterfalls, brooding skies and, in one case, a baleful moon straight out of a...

Victor Pesce at Elizabeth Harris. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The 15 recent still-life paintings by New York artist Victor Pesce in this exhibition convey a certain rustic simplicity. At first, these small and medium-sized compositions, featuring centralized arrangements of mundane objects such as...

Ellen Phelan at Senior & Shopmaker. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Ellen Phelan's recent landscapes depict the lushly verdant surroundings of her Adirondack house near Lake Champlain as a picture-perfect world. Calm, groomed scenes, empty of people, greet the viewer's eye like a pastoral mirage. They are green...

Abbas Kiarostami and Charles and Ray Eames at Andrea Rosen. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Sleepers and art films have been in bed together ever since Andy Warhol created his 8-hour masterpiece, Sleep, back in 1963, and a woman napped while a fly buzzed around her body in Yoko Ono's Fly (1970). Eschewing both Warhol's erotic gaze and...

Sophie Matisse at Francis M. Naumann. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse and the granddaughter of the prominent art dealer Pierre Matisse, Sophie Matisse has a lot of art history to shoulder. Born in Boston and educated there and in Paris, the artist has decided to embrace...

Peter Schuyff at Bill Maynes. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In his latest series of paintings, Peter Schuyff put his signature abstract motifs to playful use. First, he used the digital technique of Iris printing to reproduce Raphaelle Peale's Venus Rising from the Sea--A Deception (After the Bath), ca....

George Deem at Pavel Zoubok. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... George Deem's exhibition, "Vermeer Extended," invited the postmodern eye to a pictorial disquisition concerning originality and perspective. Such topics are germane to recent expeditions into the optical alliance of art and science. Not...

Janet Sobel at Gary Snyder. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Ukrainian-born Janet Sobel (1894-1968), a Brooklyn housewife who started painting at 43, enjoyed a brief period of renown in the mid-1940s for her drip paintings. Peggy Guggenheim exhibited her work at Art of This Century Gallery, where Clement...

Frank Nitsche at Leo Koenig. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Frank Nitsche's large-scale abstractions are collisions of contours and color fields. The six dramatic paintings in this New York solo debut, titled "Winterorbit," by the Berlin artist resonate with complex intersections of line and pattern....

Emily Cheng at Winston, Wachter Mayer. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... "Lavish" best describes New York-based painter Emily Cheng's latest venture. It's a nonstop extravaganza of intricately patterned lace, billowed draperies, swirling ribbons, delicately curled vines, tiny rosebuds and other flora, including,...

Markus Linnenbrink at Margaret Thatcher Projects. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Markus Linnenbrink, a German artist in his early 40s, has become known for creating installation-sized paintings on walls and floors, as well as for more traditional works on canvas. He almost always favors stripes, whose hues blend and comment...

Zhou Brothers at Chambers Fine Art. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Painting as a team for more than 30 years now, brothers Shan Zuo Zhou (b. 1952) and Da Huang Zhou (b. 1957) studied theater and art at the University of Shanghai and then received their master's degrees in painting from the National Academy for...

Elyn Zimmerman at Gagosian. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Lights and darks, reflections and shadows as found on the surface of moving bodies of water, are the subjects of Elyn Zimmerman's large scale, black-and-white drawings. Using ink, often in combination with graphite wash and/or watercolor, and...

John Anderson at Allan Stone. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... John Anderson is a New Jersey-based sculptor who works with construction materials--wire, wood and steel. Earlier he produced carved objects that recall tools, but this exhibition of eight large-scale sculptures, all untitled and dated 2001,...

Jeffrey Mongrain at Perimeter. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The small Chelsea space newly occupied by this Chicago gallery has cathedral-like proportions: long, narrow and tall. That seemed appropriate for Jeffrey Mongrain's work, with its inward concentration and spiritual aura. This show consisted of...

Daniel Senise at Ramis Barquet. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Brazilian artist Daniel Senise references the history of art in large, almost monochrome paintings that show vacant rooms in sharp perspective. Views of populated interiors by masters such as Vittore Carpaccio and Pieter de Hooch, and...

Ben Katchor at the Jewish Museum. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The work of Ben Katchor, a comic-strip artist who has received Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, has been featured in various publications including New York Press, the Forward, Metropolis and the New Yorker, and has been collected in the...

May Wilson at Gracie Mansion. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Fiction and fact are so intermingled in the work of May Wilson (1905-1986) that even her life story sounds made up. A (relatively) conventional wife and mother until her husband left her for a younger woman in 1966 when she was 61, she moved...

Kai Althoff at Anton Kern. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The dark, provocative tone of Kai Althoff's second solo show in New York stayed in one's mind. The exhibition consisted of 30 modest-size works installed with no apparent visual or narrative thread, as well as one sculpture consisting of two...

MacDermott & MacGough at American Fine Arts at P.H.A.G. (New York).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... David MacDermott and Peter MacGough made their names in the art world by airily discarding the weight of history for a fabricated version that celebrated their fantasies of homoerotic utopia. In the '80s, they donned Edwardian apparel and moved...

Ann Agee at P.P.O.W. (New York).(sculpture exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Ann Agee first caused comment in New York with a ceramic bathroom in Marcia Tucker's "Bad Girls" show at the New Museum: the work, created during a residency at the Kohler plumbing factory, included an ornamented sink, toilet and bidet as well...

Scott Prior at Alpha. (Boston).(contmporary Americana oil paintings)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Realist painter Scott Prior continues the New England luminist tradition with his glowing scenes of contemporary Americana, all oil on panel or linen and dated 2001. Homey interiors, vegetable gardens, dunes and woodsy, slightly derelict...

Judy Turim at Calvert. (Washington, D.C.).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Arriving at Judy Turim's recent exhibition, viewers familiar with her graceful linear works that quote the Antique (for example, Greek vases) with an almost cartoonish humor might have thought they had the wrong address--that is, when they...

K.S. Koo at Fassbender-Stevens. (Chicago).(body print exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... K.S. Koo has exhibited in Korea and the United States for the past 10 years. Her earlier works, mostly sculptural installations, were strongly influenced by Magdalena Abakanowicz and Antony Gormley. In this installation, The Secret Garden, Koo...

Terry Maker at MOCA. (FT. Collins, Colo.).(sculpture exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In this exhibition, Terry Maker showed a dozen wall sculptures dated 2000 or 2001, most made of painted canvas rolled up into skinny tubes and cut in short lengths with a bandsaw. She amasses the tubes in squares or rectangles that are...

Lorraine Tady at Barry Whistler. (Dallas).(abstract painting and sculpture exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Lorraine Tady motivates herself by asking questions as she paints, posing problems or suggesting scenarios to see where they will lead. Talking about recent large abstractions, she reports that she had wondered if she could make a painting of...

Lee Bontecou at Daniel Weinberg. (Los Angeles.(surreal drawing exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... This survey of Lee Bontecou's drawings--her first exhibition in 29 years to include new works--whetted viewers' appetites for next year's full-scale retrospective organized by Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Consistent in tone, the...

Megan McManus at Post. (Los Angeles).(painting exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... All seven paintings in this entrancing show, as well as those shown here in 2000, conform to a single format that McManus has yet to exhaust. In each image, we assume the point of view of the artist, seated, looking down onto her own lap. The...

Ron Haselden at Mobile Home. (London).(sculpture exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... There is a French road sign that reads, Trop Vite. Levez le Pied. (Too Fast. Lift your Foot.). Ron Haselden's version of that sign is a small, white, rectangular wooden box, mounted to the wall and studded with blinking white lights, the size...

"Taking Positions: Figurative Sculpture and the Third Reich" at the Henry Moore Institute. (Leeds).(Arno Breker and other sculptors in exhibition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... This show of bronzes by Arno Breker and nine of his contemporaries, curated by Penelope Curtis, filled a significant gap in the history of 20th-century art and provided a rare opportunity to assess the merits of this maligned German period....

Paolo Grassino at Giorgio Persano. (Turin).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Six miles outside Turin, the statue of a watchful stag stands atop Stupinigi, the 18th-century hunting lodge of the House of Savoy. That prominent and paradoxical icon of prey triumphant, as well as the aristocratic connotations of the art of...

Awards. (Art World).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Painter Ellsworth Kelly has been awarded the third rank of Commandeur in the Order of Arts and Letters by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York. Edgar Munhall, curator emeritus of the Frick Collection in New York, was elevated...

Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art. (Museum News).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art opens July 6 in Tacoma, Wash. The $63-million project, designed by architect Arthur Erikson, encompasses 75,000 square feet, including 13,000 square feet of exhibition space, a...

The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, now managed by PaperBall, a New York-based firm headed by dealer Marc Glimcher, recently opened the Collectors Gallery, a venue for changing exhibitions of blue-chip works of art for sale. (Museum News).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, now managed by PaperBall, a New York-based firm headed by dealer Marc Glimcher, recently opened the Collectors Gallery, a venue for changing exhibitions of blue-chip works of art for sale. The new...

Cranbook Academy of Art Museum. (Museum News).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., recently received 46 major works of modern and contemporary art from the collection of Detroit resident Rose M. Shuey and her late husband, John Shuey. Among the pieces are key...

Obituaries. (Art World).(Brief Article)(Obituary)
July 1, 2002... Livingston Biddle, Jr., 83, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, died May 4 in Washington, D.C. He helped draft the arts endowment legislation from 1963 to '65 while working for his Iongtime friend Sen. Claiborne Pell. He...

Niki de Saint Phalle, 1930-2002.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
July 1, 2002... Niki de Saint Phalle, French-American artist, 71, died May 21 of pulmonary failure in La Jolla, Calif., where she had been living since 1994. De Saint Phalle first came to attention in 1961, when she began to exhibit her work in Paris alongside...

Money Woes for Milwaukee Museum. (Art World).(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2002... Since unveiling its dramatic new addition last fall, the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) has been thrust into the international limelight. However, fame has its price, and the museum has found itself with a $20-million shortfall. The final costs for...

MOMA Curator Departing. (Art World).(Robert Storr)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Robert Storr, senior curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, is leaving his post for academia. He has been appointed to the newly established Rosalie Solow Professorship of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts,...

Philadelphia Museum Begins Expansion. (Art World).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In late January, the Philadelphia Museum of Art selected the firm Gluckman Mayner Architects to renovate a nearby office building, former home of the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company, for its expansion. The landmark Art Deco building,...

Spanish Colonial Art Museum Debuts in Santa Fe. (Art World).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... A new museum devoted to Spanish colonial art opens on July 21 in Santa Fe. Situated on a hilltop overlooking the town, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art occupies a 12,000-square-foot adobe structure adjacent to the Museum of International Folk...

Midwest Art Mags Struggling. (Art World).(Dialogue, New Art Examiner)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... This spring, two important not-for-profit art magazines in the Midwest, Dialogue and the New Art Examiner, suspended publication. Dialogue, founded in 1978 by artist Don Harvey and former Artforum editor John Coplans, reported it would cease...