Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

In This Moment Of Collective Anxiety, New Images of Man Ponders The Human Condition, And Further Disquiets The Sense

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at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the expansive exhibition New Images of Man is a both a revisiting of and expansion on a 1959 exhibition of the same name at MoMA in New York City. A tribute and comment on the human condition, the original exhibition, curated by Peter Selz, focused on new figurative work following WWII. As such, it included a wide range of artists, from de Kooning to Giacometti, working in both sculptural forms and painted images. The Blum & Poe iteration offers its own view of figurative human depiction in a vast variety of genres, from pigment prints to acrylic and oil-on-canvas, fabric, paper-mache and other mixed media, as well as sculptural figures in bronze, plaster, and even created from a mixture of fabric and human hair. [Read more…]

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters

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Reviewed by Ann Landi

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters
by Phyllis Rose
Yale University Press, 272 pp, $26.00

We live in an age when shows of photography are a mainstay of many major museums, and a handful of artists who seriously pursue the medium have even achieved celebrity status (think Sherman, Arbus, Mapplethorpe). So it’s almost mind-boggling to realize that the struggle to get photography considered a “fine art” rather than simply a mechanical craft, at least in this country, is little more than a hundred years old, and that the medium’s meteoric launch into the public consciousness is largely thanks to the efforts of one man: Alfred Steiglitz. [Read more…]