Painting

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
On the Grid with Lloyd Martin

LLOYD MARTIN LIVES AND WORKS IN RHODE ISLAND. By no means does that permit anyone to call him a New England painter. There is nothing regional about his painting. His achievement embodies Robert Hughes’ observation—made some twenty years ago—that Manhattan is no longer a creative center. A marketing center, certainly; but vital for the development of a painter’s talent? Not at all. Martin has been exhibiting annually with Stephen Haller Gallery for a full decade. Given the diagrammatic, linear rigor of work that grants no compositional quarter to expressive accidents, it is an impressive production schedule. Continue Reading
Paul Resika at Lori Bookstein

IN MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS of following Paul Resika’s painting, I have yet to see a single flower painting by him. Opening today at Lori Bookstein’s is “Paul Resika: Flowers,” a survey of atypical floral still lifes that begins in the late 1980s and continues into the present. A dozen small scale (22 x 18 inches is exceedingly small for Resika) arrangements illustrate his coloristic verve, an inheritance from his youthful study under Hans Hofmann. // // The one on the right above, Two Bouquets, is dated 1988-2011. Continue Reading
Robert Dente, Painter and Printmaker

NEW YORK REMAINS A MARKETING CENTER but it has not been a creative center for at least two decades. Robert Hughes was saying as much in the early Eighties. Artists live where they like, where they can afford. They spend just enough occasional time in New York to get to know galleries where their work fits the stable. Gladhanding is an art in itself but it is not the primary one.  Good art is still made across the country by serious artists who have decided against the bruising demands of seeking name recognition in advance of the perfection of their work. Continue Reading
Hedy O'Beil at Gallery 307

It is always interesting to view the work of art critics. Most often, the soul of their criticism—its preferences and loyalties—is encapsulated in their own art. Hedy O’Beil has been a guide to the art world for close to 40 years. She contributed to Arts magazine in its heyday, from 1976 to 1985 when it was under the editorship of Hilton Kramer and, later, Richard Martin. She has lectured, taught and written on art and artists in various venues in the quarter century since. Continue Reading