Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

  • Home
  • Riot Material Magazine
    • About Riot Material
    • Entering The Mind
    • Contact
    • Masthead
    • Categories >
      • Art
      • Artist
      • Books
      • Cinema Disordinaire
      • Film
      • Interview
      • Jazz
      • Riot Sounds
      • Thought
      • More   >
        • Architecture
        • Image
        • Records
        • The Line
        • The New Word
        • That Evening Sun
        • The Natural World
        • Video
  • Art
    • Art Reviews
  • Books
    • Book Reviews
  • Film
    • Film Reviews
  • Records
    • Jazz Reviews
    • All Reviews
  • Riot Sounds
  • Cinema Disordinaire
    • Riot Cinema

Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth

February 17, 2018 By Emily Nimptsch

at the Broad, Los Angeles (through March 13, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing. Preconceptions which are sort of “knowing” may be placed in doubt or may be affirmed by seeing. 一 Jasper Johns, 1965

In a sudden moment of creative clarity and focus, Jasper Johns awoke from a dream in 1954 with a vision of the American flag dancing around in his head. The then-emerging New York-based multimedia artist knew immediately that he had to paint it. Not having the money for a new canvas, he simply used some old bedsheets instead. Little did Johns know at the time that he was creating an image that would elevate him to the upper echelons of artistic fame and forever alter the course of art history.

Now sixty-four years later, the Broad Museum, the mecca for all things modern art in Los Angeles, is looking back on this celebrated artist’s momentous collection of flag paintings in concert with his later number, target, and map works. Consisting of over 120 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints, including many that have never displayed in the city before, this extensive and historically significant collaboration between the Broad and London’s Royal Academy explores Johns’s oeuvre thematically rather than chronologically. This curatorial choice allows the viewer to see works of different eras on the same wall and make unexpected, eye-opening connections.

Photo by Bob Adelman. Jasper Johns in his Riverside Drive studio in New York City in 1964. Encaustic and collage on canvas (three panels). 84.138 x 142.24 cm. The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection. © Bob Adelman Estate

With its title borrowed from a 2006 interview in which the artist hoped his works offered, “something resembling truth,” this much-anticipated retrospective is a meaningful one for the museum’s chief patrons and namesakes, Eli and Edythe Broad as Jasper Johns’s Untitled (1975), a lively cross-hatched painting included in this show, was one of the first contemporary art pieces the couple ever collected. Adding to the excitement and historical significance of this exhibition, this is also the first major Johns retrospective in City of Angels since a 1965 Pasadena Museum of Art showing curated by legendary Ferus Gallery co-founder Walter Hopps.

Jasper Johns
Untitled, 1991
Jasper Johns
Painting Bitten By A Man, 1961
Jasper Johns
Montez Singing, 1989-90

Undoubtedly a master of paradox, Jasper Johns seems to exist in a world of betweens, between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, between painting and sculpture, between chaos and structure, between public and private, between emotion and fact, and also between the familiar and the unexpected. Like a Zen koan, this paradoxical stance running throughout Something Resembling Truth allows Johns to break down preconceptions to get to the very heart of language, image, and communication. In a Descartian manner, he strips his knowledge back to the elementary school basics of letters, numbers, maps, and flags in order to question what he knows and gain a fresh, truthful perspective on the world.

Aptly titled Things the Mind Already Knows, the first room in this show is dedicated to Johns’s celebrated flag paintings. Here we see the artist breakdown assumptions and prejudgements about this ubiquitous and complex icon. The American flag is an object that most people have seen countless times in their daily lives. Nearly everyone has deep-seated opinions about this symbolic object. Much like art itself, everyone sees something different in the flag.

Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1992–4. The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, In Memory of My Feelings, Frank O’Hara, 1961. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, partial gift of Apollo Plastics Corporation, courtesy of Stefan T. Edlis and H. Gael Neeson, Photo © MCA Chicago. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Created in the era of Cold War and McCarthyism, these flag images have the internal ambiguity of connoting both patriotism and subversion. Interestingly, with similar national debates surrounding the meaning of the flag, immigration, and nationalism thrust into the public consciousness recently, we are reminded just how much and how little has changed over the past sixty years.

Additionally, the flag has personal significance for Johns as both he and his father were named after American Revolutionary War hero Sergeant William Jasper (1750-1779), who rescued the flag in two significant battles, and even died raising the American flag over a fort. Reflecting on the autobiographical meaning of the flag in his work, Johns has admitted that “the flag could just as well be a stand-in for father as for me.”

However, the artist has also been known to be somewhat elusive about the meanings behind his work. Johns has never confirmed his own beliefs on the political meaning behind the image, but has urged viewers to come to their own conclusions as he believes that the audience completes the work themselves through their varied interpretations. In making these paintings, he hopes that the audience will take the time to simply look at these pieces without preconceptions.

Flag On Orange Field, 1957. Photo courtesy of Emily Nimptsch.

Interestingly, as the flag paintings are some of the artist’s most recognizable works, they are also the first to be presented in the exhibition in an effort to break down the viewer’s assumptions about this artist and his work. In the act of looking, the viewer notices small, intimate details like the rough, impasto texture and the little bits of newspaper infused in the surface. In this emphasis on the gaze, the audience cannot help but admire the process, the act of art making. We notice that Johns’s version of flag features both geometric order and chaotic, gestural brushstrokes. The rigid, orderly aspect of these paintings foreshadow the wave of minimalism in the art world to come, while the disorderly dripping references the Abstract Expressionism of the previous generation. Further blending the old and the new, Johns famously created these richly textured, almost sculptural surfaces using the ancient substance of encaustic, a mixture of heated beeswax and pigment. The fluidity of the ecaustic in these images echoes the fluidity between abstraction and representation as they inhabit a mysterious, paradoxical realm between flag and painting of a flag.

Perhaps as an homage to Belgian Surrealist René Magritte’s famed The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) from 1929, here we see Johns exploring the connection between an object, its name, and its image, a theme that Johns builds upon throughout his career.

The first painting that catches the eye in this room is Flag (1954-55). Originally debuting at New York’s Leo Castelli gallery in a group show in 1957, and then again in a solo show the following year, this iconic image skyrocketed Johns into the public eye.

Building upon the flag theme, Johns soon begins to experiment with vivid colors in Flag on Orange Field (1957) which includes a traditional red, white, and blue flag located within a vibrant orange field. With its sumptuous shades, luminosity, and vertical orientation, this painting is reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s abstract and yet deeply spiritual color field paintings. With Johns’s inclusion of the American flag in a painting of this style, he playfully mixes the sublime with the mundane.  

In 1958’s Three Flags, we see Johns studying dimensionality and perspective through the layering of three painted flag canvases that get smaller with each added layer. In a rejection of the flatness associated with Abstract Expressionism, this painting extends into the viewer’s space. It also rejects the traditional gospel of illusionistic painting, depicting closer objects as large and farther objects as small.

Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura‑Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY 

Adding color theory into this flag motif, 1965’s Flags compares two flag images on the same ash gray field. Again orientated vertically, the top flag is painted orange, slate gray, emerald green, and black with a white dot at the center. Bottom flag is the same hue as the surrounding field but features textural hints of American flag design and a black dot at its center. If the viewer stares at the white dot for twenty seconds and then immediately at bottom flag, the eye will reproduce the red, white, and blue version of the flag in that spot. Here Johns masterfully makes looking at artwork a joy as the viewer’s effort is rewarded with clarity and understanding.

Figure 5, 1960

Moving on from the flag room, Johns extends this same emphasis on looking and elementary school basics to letters and numbers in the next two galleries. In the early 1960s, the artist depicted several arabic numerals and letters either alone, in grids, rows, or superimposed on top of each other. The font and styles typically varied. Some were stenciled and some were freehand. Greatly influenced by Willem de Kooning’s figure paintings, Johns referred to the numbers seen here as figures, therefore elevating them to a human-like status.

We can see this reverence for numbers in 1960’s Figure 5, a full, rounded, and mural-sized portrait of the number 5 featuring gestural black, white, and gray brushstrokes. Somehow simultaneously both voluminous and flat, ambiguous and clear, this public, everyday symbol becomes private, esoteric, and somewhat spiritual.

Moving through the exhibition, we find even more examples of recontextualized public symbols in Johns’ series of target paintings. These archery-inspired targets have gone through a Duchampian-inspired process here, elevating them to high art. The monochrome and primary-colored targets allow the viewer to simply enjoy the beauty and essence of this geometric design. Interestingly, these targets might actually also be inspired by the Zen ideology stressing the artist’s lack of ego, aim, and purpose. As Eastern religion was introduced to American audiences around this time and Johns became interested through his friend, composer John Cage. Resembling eyes, these works are quite hypnotic and meditative. As one’s eye is drawn to the center of the target, the pupil, the eye also seems to find center of the self, the “I.”

Jasper Johns, Fool’s House, 1961–62. Private collection. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Furthering his study of the commonplace, Johns explores life as an artist with In The Studio, a room dedicated to his paintings about the artmaking process. Here we see a variety of artworks featuring a mix of everyday objects and studio tools such as cans, wires, and rulers adhered to the canvas. This theme of studio life is one with a rich history, as 18th century French still life painter Pierre Cossard, Pablo Picasso, George Braque, and Henri Matisse have all dabbled in this type of subject matter. In 1961-62’s Fool’s House, we see several kitchen related items, including a cup, a broom, and a towel attached to vertically oriented canvas. Building upon his interest in Magritte-esque semiotics and the relationship between word and object, Johns has actually labeled each of these items with lines and arrows. While these objects may be clearly marked, definable, they are also fraught with the duality of being the very tools used in the art making process. The broom becomes a stand-in for the paintbrush, and just below the broom we even see a hint of oil paint marking semicircular brushstrokes on the canvas. With this effect, it looks as if Johns has swept the picture-plane. Extending this repurposing to other items seen here, the cup could also serve as a paint mixing container and the dish towel could become a paint rag.

Titled Fragments and Faces, the following room returns to the theme of the human figure. While in the past, Johns had viewed the body through the lens of numbers, here we see fractured casts and molds of varying body parts to in order to examine the relationship between the part and the whole. In the 1964 pastiche Watchman, the artist had been inspired by the life-size wax figures of celebrities he saw while visiting London’s Madame Tussauds. This cryptic yet seminal piece features a wax cast of a man’s leg. Located in the upper right-hand corner of the canvas, we see this flesh-colored, objectified leg seated in a chair, both are upside down. Again, we also notice hints of gestural abstraction, patches of the primary colors, as well as the corresponding stenciled words “red,” “yellow,” and “blue.”

Watchman, 1964. Photo courtesy of Emily Nimptsch.

As an avid reader of spy novels, Johns is fascinated by the idea of the watchman, a character that simply watches the others. However, a watchman is not to be confused with a spy, someone who watches and collects information without being noticed. Perhaps the characters of spy and watchman are metaphors for the artist and the viewer. Here we see Johns perhaps concocting a mysterious narrative about seeing and being seen.  

Ultimately, Jasper Johns offers a timeless meditation on the art and joy of looking. This is a passion that he shares with another one of his idols, Paul Cézanne. Both he and Johns were working directly in-between major artistic movements — Cézanne with the Impressionism and Cubism and Johns with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. While both of these artists are often erroneously lumped in with the sweeping styles of their immediate predecessors, they both actually focused on themes of perception and optics. While Cézannes’ work may look like a quick, impressionistic take on a scene, he famously only wished to paint what he saw. He would labor for hours, staring at his subjects and making only methodical brushstrokes. He refused to rely on the artistic crutch of black outlines. The result is messy, but reveals the instability of reality. It is as if Cézanne is painting the raw data that meets the eye either directly before the mind processes the scene or the blurriness of an object the second you look away from it. Also a pupil or student of perception, Johns’ work does the opposite: it rewards your confused and often vexed gaze with an ecstatic moment of complete clarity and understanding.

~

Emily Nimptsch is Los Angeles Art Critic for Riot Material magazine. Ms. Nimptsch is also a freelance arts and culture writer who has written for Flaunt, ArtSlant, Artillery, ArteFuse, and Time Out Los Angeles.

[paypal_donation_button]

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Trackbacks

  1. In Full Surrender to the Wylie Eye – Riot Material says:
    April 20, 2023 at 11:49 am

    […] into a visual shorthand. She paints a TV dance-show contestant in rather the same spirit as Jasper Johns paints the American flag: both paint what the mind already knows but the eye often skips over. What […]

The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Detail of Henry Taylor, "Warning shots not required," 2011. At Riot Material magazine.

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

Henry Taylor: B Side at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023) Reviewed by Eve Wood Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B […]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Reviewed by Dan Chiasson The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93 NYR Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

Smoking the Bible Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99 HR Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

Reviewed by Cintra Wilson The History of Bones: A Memoir by John Lurie Random House, 435 pp., $28.00 NYRB It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing […]

Marlene Dumas, "Losing (Her Meaning)," 1988. At Riot Material magazine.

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite […]

Clarice Lispector

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

Reviewed by John Biscello Água Viva by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 88pp., $14.95 Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 864pp., $29.95 The word is my fourth dimension –Clarice Lispector And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. […]

Donna Ferrato "Diamond, Minneapolis, MN 1987." At Riot Material magazine

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC (through July 29 2022) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban The small scale of Donna Ferrato’s snapshot-like black-and-white photographs belies their personal and political power. Whether they document the medical sinks and shelves in a now-shuttered Texas abortion clinic, or hone in on the badly bruised face of a domestic violence […]

Darcilio Lima Unknown Lithograph, 1972. At Riot Material magazine.

Magia Protetora: The Art of Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos and Darcilio Lima

at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, Cleveland OH (through 30 September 2022) Curated by Stephen Romano Gallery Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz The extension of a lineage occurs not merely by the repetition of form, but by the intersection of conservation and revolution. Transformation is fundamental to preserving the essence of a given tradition’s rituals and […]

Eve Wood's A Cadence for Redemption, written in the fictive voice of Abraham Lincoln, is excerpted at Riot Material magazine.

Songs For Our Higher Selves

A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln by Eve Wood Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99 Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who […]

The Clear, Crisp Taste of Cronenberg

Crimes of the Future Reviewed by Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller Neon NYRB A line from Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film, has been trailing it around with the campy insistence of an old-fashioned ad campaign: “Surgery is the new sex.” On receiving this information, a skeptical Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks, “Does there have […]

Georganne Deen, How to prepare people for your weirdness (Painting for a gifted child) 2022

Conjuring a Divine Silence in Georganne Deen’s The Lyric Escape

at Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (through 6 August) Reviewed by Eve Wood Albert Camus once famously asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” One can only hope that this was a rhetorical question, yet however ironic, it is still a sentiment worth pondering, especially considering today’s current socio-political climate […]

Pesticides in our foods inevitably enter the body and will have the intended effect of killing the organism. Which is to say you are certain to become diseased and evenutally die from the longterm ingestion of industrial pesticides.

A Strictly Organic Diet is Good Enough to Save Your Life

A chapter excerpt from Entering the Mind, the new book from C von Hassett which speaks to an ageless way of resting the mind in meditation to both recognize and stabilize in its already Awakened state. Yet to do this successfully, we must first cleanse the body of its myriad mind-fogging toxins taken in through […]

Milton’s Quotidian Paradise, Lost

By Catherine Nicholson Katie Kadue: Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton Timothy M. Harrison: Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton Joe Moshenska: Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton NYRB Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic […]

Foucault in Warsaw and the Shapeless, Shaping Gaze of the Surveillance State

Reviewed by Marcel Radosław Garboś Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński  translated by Sean Gasper Bye Open Letter Books, 220pp., $15.95 Harvard Review Since Poland’s state socialist system collapsed in 1989, the records of its police agencies and security services have gone to a government commission entrusted with the “prosecution of crimes against the Polish […]

Noah Davis, Untitled (2015)

The Haunt of One Yet Faintly Present: Noah Davis, Still at Home

Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, Los Angeles Reviewed by Ricky Amadour Directly across from the entrance, an opening statement to Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, reads “many of the paintings you are about to see were painted in this space.” Smudges, dribbles, and droplets on the floor embody the physical notion of Davis […]

Julian Schnabel, The Chimes of Freedom Flashing (detail), 2022

The Supremely Humanistic Hand of Julian Schnabel

For Esmé – With Love and Squalor, at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (through 21 May 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood How does one represent, let alone quantify hope, hate, grief, love, joy, tragedy, or anything, for that matter, which stands in opposition to something else? Throughout his illustrious career, Julian Schnabel has always been one to […]

Rose Wylie, "I Like To Be" (2020)

In Full Surrender to the Wylie Eye

Rose Wylie: Which One, at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 June) Reviewed by David Salle Rose Wylie: Which One by Rose Wylie; with Barry Schwabsky, Judith Bernstein, and Hans Ulrich Obrist David Zwirner Books, 196pp., $75.00 NYRB Rose Wylie, who is now eighty-seven, has been painting in the same rural studio in Kent, England, since […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in