By Chadd Scott What is Modern art? Monet, Renoir and Degas? Yes. Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne? Yes. Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky. Of course. Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko. Naturally. Modern art–the period between the rise of Impressionism in the 1860s through Pop art in the 1960s–has been defined by its titans, their work, their legacies. Read […]
By Dmitry Samarov It’s rare for me to be surprised by a painting show, but I didn’t see “Taking Shape” coming. The exhibition is a generous survey of abstract art made from the 1950s to the 1980s, drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation based in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. “Taking […]
By Lori Waxman “Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s” at the Block Museum offers so much more than what its subtitle describes. Anyone who loves, studies or makes nonrepresentational paintings ought to see this traveling exhibition, and not just for the sheer joy of a gorgeous show full of surprises. It is the […]
By Aya Nimer Often, the most intimate relationships we have in our lives are to the places we come to know and live in. Soetsu Yanagi highlights this relationship in The Beauty of Everyday Things, where he expresses how the objects around us comprise the most trustworthy companions of our everyday routines. These objects and places […]
August 12, 2019 By Larry Luowei Zhang This portrait depicts the remarkable transgender and AIDS activist Marsha P. Johnson. Her resistance and outspoken advocacy during the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, which began on the night of June 28, 1969, helped spark the LGBTQ civil rights movement in America. This portrayal of Johnson by […]
Fritz Ascher: Expressionist is the first American solo retrospective to showcase this artist’s bold, colorful oeuvre, which features early academic studies and figural compositions as well as late mystical landscapes devoid of human presence. We hear our contributor Irene Javors who reviews this exhibition for Museum Edge.
You have probably never heard of Fritz Ascher, a passionate and peculiar painter who, nearly 40 years after his death, is finally getting a smidgen of renown at New York’s Grey Art Gallery. Ascher belonged to a generation of German artists the Nazis hounded into hiding — or worse — leaving a chapter in the history of art truncated and brimming with might-have-beens.
New York University’s latest photography exhibit showcased at Grey Art Gallery, titled NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960, features a collection of 174 images from over 60 Italian photographers. As the title references, the photographs are from Italy before, during, and after World War II. The concept of neorealism was a cinematic and literary movement that showed the disastrous postwar conditions, helping inspire this collection.
In 1932, to commemorate the first decade of Fascist rule in Italy, Benito Mussolini inaugurated the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome. The exhibition, which consisted of 23 rooms filled with myriad forms of art, historical documentation, and artifacts, stayed on display for two years. It proved a massive success, drawing more than 2.8 million visitors.
Italian neorealism is rooted in the bloodied soil of Fascism. When postwar life arrived for the artists, filmmakers, and photographers who had trudged through the Benito Mussolini years as propagandists, their work had to evolve from goading the nationalistic fervor that drove Italy toward war. Shaped by an era of denouement, Italian neorealism diffused the belligerence of warmongering into a romanticization of the country’s laborers and emerging middle class. Accordingly, the genre became a dynamic negotiation between the realities of postwar recovery and the impulse to render la belleza della vita, the beauty of life, no matter the material conditions of this recovery.