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June 28: art copies life, perhaps
This is my snapshot of a gray Mark Rothko on a gray museum wall.* The photo doesn’t flatter it, though it’s a little hard to make out, even in the flesh. It’s pretty spare for a Rothko. The white margin looks like a frame, but isn’t; it’s just an uncharacteristically messy and unresolved edge…
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June 21: rising above “pictures”–or not.
Old-fashioned (call it “pre-war”) art was often inventive and visually complex. The Edward Hopper piece here is full of odd colors and shapes. Its rhymes and repetitions–the bread and butter of composition–are subtle. But it works, it holds together, and the only real diss that a committed modernist could lay on it is that it’s a…
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June 14: Newman grand but oddly wiggly
Robert and Jane Meyerhoff must have been either very peppy connoisseurs, or very well advised, or both, judging from the show of their collection at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco ( until October 12).* The show includes all fourteen of Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross,” painted between 1958 and 1966. Now I have to admit that…