Tag Archives: sculpture

‘Caucasian, Bloody and Syphilitic’

Posted on March 9, 2023 by JMN

… If you keep your eyes open, some unexpected moment of beauty will stop you in your tracks. (Will Heinrich) The 31st annual Outsider Art Fair… is New York’s largest clearinghouse of work by self-taught and marginalized artists…This is what … 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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Beethovian

Posted on December 16, 2020 by JMN

If there’s something that can be called a Beethovian gravitas assumable by a sculptor who is female, artist Maggi Hambling is a contender. That’s by way of an admiring aside to the topic of this article. “Luxuriantly bushed,” “obligingly passive,” … Continue reading →

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Degas: Opéra Superfan

Posted on December 23, 2019 by JMN

This painter who “didn’t like women,” in van Gogh’s estimation, found at the Opéra [de Paris] an arena of desire and depredation that he could translate into pure form — beautiful and stifling, modern and cold. This is the truth … Continue reading →

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George Condo

Posted on November 3, 2019 by JMN

Mr. Condo, 61, is best known for his bold figurative paintings that blend old master techniques and cartoonish characters, capturing a range of emotions from many perspectives in a method he calls “psychological Cubism.” “In the early days of Cubism, … Continue reading →

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Feminine He Ain’t

Posted on August 28, 2019 by JMN

This article describes Richard Serra as “the best-known living sculptor in America.” His medium is steel, in which he enshrines “abstract forms as maximalist feats of mass and scale.” At the Museum of Modern Art… a room-sized assembly of eight, … Continue reading →

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“You Invent Your Own Game”

Posted on March 24, 2019 by JMN

Older artists profiled in this article are achieving belated critical and financial success after laboring in obscurity for much of their careers. In her title the author makes the artists’ ethnicity explicit, providing good context for the categorization, and it’s … Continue reading →

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Whatchamacallits & Dingleberries

Posted on December 3, 2018 by JMN

http://www.artfixdaily.com/images/pr/Bonhams_Calder_Maripose.jpg Frank Zappa … compared his music to Calder’s sculptures, describing his cerebral, often atonal songs as “a multicolored whatchamacallit, dangling in space, that has big blobs of metal connected to pieces of wire, balanced ingeniously against little metal dingleberries … Continue reading →

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“Why not just paint a mustache on everything?”

Posted on October 1, 2018 by JMN

I read this in the Times or Guardian last year: When Gutzon Borglum was promoting his idea of carving faces into Mount Rushmore (1927-1941), many people were scandalized and incredulous. What a silly, useless notion! What a lack of respect … Continue reading →

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Feelings and Imagination

Posted on September 19, 2018 by JMN

I once authored a proto-blog in the BI (Before Internet) epoch, an ante-deluvian moment on the cyber-scale of time. I was based in a rambling bayou city situated in a large, hidebound, arrière-garde, rump-facing state of the sector of the … Continue reading →

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