Tag Archives: journalism

Jane Kaufman

Posted on July 16, 2021 by JMN

The savory quotation that leaps from this obituary of artist Jane Kaufman (1938 – 2021) is from Holland Cotter’s review of a 2008 retrospective at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y. “It’s funky, funny, fussy, perverse, obsessive, riotous, accumulative, … Continue reading →

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UK Sculptor: Hard Row to Hoe

Posted on July 3, 2021 by JMN

It will be [a shrine], but not for art lovers. Or for anyone who is easily embarrassed. Perhaps not even for Diana’s sincerest believers, for the statue group’s emotive symbolism is undermined by its aesthetic awfulness. In style it breathes … Continue reading →

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Exponential Obscurity Rectified*

Posted on May 30, 2021 by JMN

*Scruple dictates that I confess to having added to the fog of blather by blatantly erring in my attempt to run the numbers in the original post. A bright lad has shown me the light, and the revised numbers do … Continue reading →

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Shows and Prose

Posted on May 28, 2021 by JMN

Along comes more NYTimes torqued and taut art talk of the sort that sweeps me up. … Several gorgeous self-portraits made toward the end of his life. Their precision is astonishing… It’s clear that what most interested Ellis about ink … Continue reading →

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‘A Fisherman Holds Up a Trout He Caught’

Posted on May 26, 2021 by JMN

El hijo de su madre has stumbled upon an El Dorado of found poetry in the “Outdoors” fishing column of a local newspaper. Bink Grimes’s lavish rundown of the piscatory scene pulses with staccato verve, inside lingo, and riptide granularity. … Continue reading →

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Messing With Space

Posted on May 6, 2021 by JMN

Like a pig rooting for truffles I harvest luscious phrases from Roberta Smith’s art critiques. After “he jumped on the Color Field painting bandwagon,” Jules Olitski (1922 – 2007) created works that “mess with space and scale in a visceral, … Continue reading →

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‘Gloopy Glory’

Posted on May 5, 2021 by JMN

The paintings of 90-year-old Frank Auerbach, “last surviving member of a pathfinding generation of postwar British figurative painters,” are up my alley. Auerbach’s iterative pigment attacks are savage and astonishing, and Jason Farago is always good for a blue-streak of … Continue reading →

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How Are Posh Men Educated?

Posted on May 4, 2021 by JMN

…The vanities of posh men… centre on an ancient system that trains a narrow caste of people to run our affairs…. Ever questing to penetrate British lingo, I wobble over “public” versus “private” education in the kingdom’s parlance. In my … Continue reading →

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‘Miner of Difficult Truths’

Posted on April 21, 2021 by JMN

I can study all day Alice Neel’s brushwork and modeling of flesh and features, how she gestures at her subjects’ surroundings with casual precision. Her “Carmen and Judy” has a frank, womanly exactness and searing intimacy that The New Yorker’s … Continue reading →

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Wide Load

Posted on March 28, 2021 by JMN

Jason Farrago lavishes a container shipload of exegetical rumination on Julie Mehretu’s paintings. Lines accreted in an essentially radial configuration, with large arcs orbiting an absent central axis, and orthogonal spokes sprouting from the core. (The Mehretu black line is … Continue reading →

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