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☆ One for the Ages: Sonia Delaunay’s Wearable Abstractions
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-25 | by ( Walker Mimms | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

If Wassily Kandinsky bent the visible world to the whims of his canvas, reducing concert hall scenes to puddles of color and line, Sonia Delaunay seems to have worked the other way around. A fashion and textile designer by trade, the Ukrainian-born Delaunay (1885-1979) filled the world with bold and delightful patterns — with the chevrons and dot grids and floral wiggles of the many scarves and dresses she created in France — then let her paintings reflect the results. Or at least that’s the impression given by the Bard Graduate Center’s “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art,” a playful but rigorous unearthing of 184 garments, artifacts and paintings — most on loan from France — spanning 60 years of Delaunay’s career.

Persons: Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay, Delaunay, France —, Center’s “ Sonia Delaunay Organizations: Bard, France Locations: Ukrainian, France

☆ The Growing Pains of Modern Spectacle
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-16 | by ( Walker Mimms | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As visual storytelling presses toward new technological heights, it is worth recalling that some of the oldest and richest tactics of illusion — from the proscenium arches of the Renaissance to the lintels and lightboxes of Robert Wilson — originated onstage. Over the past 20 years, many spatially encompassing and conceptually driven sets have come from the British artist Es Devlin, a stage designer for Adele, The Weeknd and for U2, at the maiden show of The Sphere, Las Vegas’s new 160,000-square-foot dome of LED screen. When no concert screen could impress enough last year, Devlin’s billboard-sized one for Beyoncé delivered like some fulfillment from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Recessed into the screen’s center, an enormous disc housed strategic elements from the singer’s three-hour video — disco balls, a womb of amniotic fluid, a fembot’s birth canal. Before this ever-changing aperture, Beyoncé emerged between her costume changes, like Christ from the tomb.

Persons: Robert Wilson —, Es Devlin, Adele, Beyoncé Locations: British

☆ ‘Southern/Modern’: Rediscovering the Radical Art Below the Mason-Dixon Line
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-30 | by ( Walker Mimms | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Of the many strengths of “Southern/Modern,” a daring and revisionist show about the American South at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, the one that follows you out to your car is the alternate history of modern art it proposes. Southern art — or food or literature, for that matter — has long suffered a reputation of isolation. You would have to be born there,” says the tortured Quentin in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” Ninety years later, Southern exceptionalism is over (mostly), and the area’s artists and curators and chefs now go to great, overcorrective lengths to be global, to be modern. But the artists of Faulkner’s day — they were still responding to an ancient, haunted South. These 100 or so paintings and prints suggest an invigorating direction that was there all along: a pungent pairing of social history with artistic experiment during the first half of the 20th century.

Persons: ”, Quentin, William Faulkner’s “ Absalom, Absalom ! ”, Mason, “ Organizations: Georgia Museum of Art, Dixon, Museum of Modern Art Locations: Athens, Southern exceptionalism, Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, New York

☆ The Original Birders Gave Photography a Run for its Money
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-03 | by ( Walker Mimms | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

As the National Audubon Society recovers from a referendum to change its name in light of the fact that America’s founding birder was a slave owner (the name stayed), a luxe reissue of John James Audubon’s magnum opus, BIRDS OF AMERICA (Abbeville, $195), proves the man’s artistry itself unimpeachable. His paintings foretold the ambitions of the camera, and at only a quarter of the size of the four-volume folio that was first published between 1827 and 1838, this still hefty edition preserves the poetic backdrops and fierce detail of the original. The copperplate lines are so exact they mimic the individual venation of feathers; the neck of a gyrfalcon takes on all the ripply realism of moiréd silk.

Persons: birder, John James Audubon’s Organizations: National Audubon Society, OF Locations: Abbeville

☆ At New York’s Coenties Slip, an Artist Colony and a ‘Rebellion’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-27 | by ( Walker Mimms | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In “The Slip,” Prudence Peiffer’s tenderly researched group biography, six visual artists in different seasons of life and seeking different aesthetic ideals met Barr’s challenge with an unlikely spirit of concert. Beside him is his art school friend Jack Youngerman, painter of shaggy color fields in organic, almost floral forms. Grown bored in postwar Paris, the Jersey boy and the Kentuckian relocated to the abandoned sail-making lofts of Coenties Slip, an old manufacturing block in the toe of Manhattan. From 1956 to around 1964, an artist colony and some truly epochal art took shape there. That scene has long fascinated critics but never been the subject of a researched narrative history until now.

Persons: Prudence Peiffer, ”, Alfred H, Barr Jr, Jackson Pollock, Barr, Prudence Peiffer’s tenderly, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, Youngerman, Youngerman’s, Delphine Seyrig, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Robert Indiana Organizations: New York, Museum of Modern Locations: Paris, Jersey, Manhattan, New Mexico, Minnesota, Chicago, Europe

☆ Will the Internet Democratize Art or Destroy It?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Walker Mimms | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

A mock-up of the first page of the Artist’s Contract, written by the gallerist Seth Siegelaub and the lawyer Robert Projansky in 1971.Credit... Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky, via Rizzoli and Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam, Estate of Seth Siegelaub and MarjaBloem. Photo: Nash Baker

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