Art Writing

Sacred and Profane, Mainly

HOW TO BEGIN? Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art does not make it easy. I could take the high road and start this way: “Memory of the sacred lingers even among secular moderns who proclaim themselves celebrants of a totally profane world.” Or I could be up front about the unbearable shallowness of being (an academic in the arts) that skews its subject into a myopic caricature of religious culture. The exhibition concerns itself with correspondence between certain contemporary artworks and ancient reliquaries. Continue Reading
Winter Sampler at Denise Bibro Fine Art

THE WEEKS BETWEEN MID-DECEMBER AND EARLY JANUARY are a slow news time in the galleries. That makes it a very good time to introduce artists whom galleries are interested in taking aboard or ones they simply like but cannot accommodate on the roster. Denise Bibro’s Winter Salon is a lively sampler of 21 artists, six of them invited guests. Recognition comes slowly to artists like David Barnett, sui generis and not readily pigeonholed in a particular movement or line of descent. Continue Reading
Michael Fried & Caravaggio

DOES MICHAEL FRIED LIKE ART? Anyone who has dragged themselves through his Absorption and Theatricality has to wonder. It is tempting to push the question a bit further and ask just what it is that he sees when he looks at art. Too often, it seems as though he sees only himself and his own position as a disciple of Clement Greenberg. Fried is the celebrity art historian at Johns Hopkins University and director of its Humanities Center. His latest text, The Moment of Caravaggio, is here on my desk. Continue Reading
Gombrich, Again

A PAINTER ON FACULTY SOMEWHERE emailed me to regret that Gombrich had become:
. . . a voice that is little heard at the schools in which I’ve taught. . . . “The Visual Image:  Its Place in Communication” is particularly good in throwing students for a loop; “On Art and Artists” is nice, too.  There’s only one other instructor at [Anonymous U], as far as I know, who introduces Gombrich to the students.  Otherwise, his books are gathering dust in the library. 
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Thinking of Gombrich

IS THERE AN ARTIST ANYWHERE who does not have Ernst Gombrich on the shelf? Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, or—my favorite—The Sense of Order are perennial staples in the studio. If there is room for only one book, The Essential Gombrich fills the bill. His The Story of Art is a stock item in libraries across the country. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across this footnote in Norman F. Cantor’s riveting Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century:
I have to admit that I must be almost alone in not learning anything of importance from the writings of (Aby) Warburg’s other famed student, Ernst H.
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