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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Things to Read with Caravaggio in Mind

HASAN NIYAZI, impressario of Three Pipe Problem, had included a list of readings that informed his essay in the previous post, Navigating the Cognitive Philosophy of Michael Fried. I omitted the roster simply to conform more closely to the format of Studio Matters. The audience for this blog are, in the main, other working artists, a critic or two (one of whom comments anonymously), and art history buffs in the finest sense of the word amateur. Professional art historians, a rarified priesthood, tend to prefer talking to each other. Continue Reading

Navigating the Cognitive Philosophy of Michael Fried

by Hasan Niyazi CARAVAGGIO AND HIS FOLLOWERS IN ROME has arrived at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Those unable to experience the majesty of the Baroque in person are left to ponder the substantial catalogue recently published by Yale University Press. Featuring essays by exhibition organizers and notable scholars of the Baroque, Michael Fried’s contribution,  Notes Toward a Caravaggisti Pictorial Poetics, will be seen by some as riding on the critical success of his 2010 study The Moment of Caravaggio. Continue Reading

Christ and His Opposite?

ONE PROBLEM WITH ART HISTORIANS-TURNED-JOURNALISTS lies in the requirements of journalism. The art pundit must be interesting; no matter if accuracy suffers. Diversion is the name of the game. Elegant and high-minded, to be sure, but diverting nonetheless. And there really is not time, given the copy deadlines of daily or even weekly publications, to do much homework on the subject one wishes to be interesting about. Art history, like art talk across the board, is useful as a higher entertainment.buy Continue Reading

Elizabeth O’Reilly at George Billis Gallery

MODESTY IS NOT CHARACTERISTIC OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE. Prevailing emphasis on self-assertion, and the pseudo-profundity that fuels it in the visual arts, leaves little room for the quietude and lucidity that are the hallmarks of Elizabeth O’Reilly’s painting. O’Reilly brings to art an intuitive regard for man’s sense of place. It is a sensibility that makes the locks on the Union Street Bridge, spanning Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a significant aspect of home. Under her eye, urban details can as easily approach the wellsprings of serenity as a Douglas fir on Long Island’s North Fork, where O’Reilly spends her weekends. Continue Reading

Hail, Cristoforo Colombo

COLUMBUS’ SEAFARING ACHIEVEMENT HAS BEEN CELEBRATED in various Western nations for different reasons. Here at home, Columbus Day entered the calendar as a day to celebrate the contribution of immigrants—particularly Italian Catholic ones—to the United States. So, please, folks, let us not pull our skirts back from a magnificent mariner, who first set sail at ten, and the glory—down the centuries—of his explorations. // // The consummate historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Pulitzer Prize winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, describes Columbus this way:
Christopher Columbus, Discoverer of the New World, was first and foremost a sailor.
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