Sculpture

Calder at the National Portrait Gallery

WE ARE SO FAMILIAR WITH ALEXANDER CALDER’S kinetic mobiles and painted stabiles, we forget that he was also a prolific portraitist.  Throughout his career, Calder (1898-1976) portrayed entertainment, sports, and art-world figures, including Josephine Baker, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh, as well as colleagues , Fernand Léger, and Saul Steinberg, among others. Herewith, the museum’s introductory précis:
Typically, Calder worked in the unorthodox medium of wire, a flexible linear material, which he shaped into three-dimensional portraits of considerable character and nuance.
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A Tea Party in the Arts?

‘WHAT MIGHT A TEA PARTY IN ART LOOK LIKE?” That was the question asked by a reader in his response to yesterday’s aprés-election post. It is a delicious question. Poignantly quixotic, to be sure, but no less delightful for that. It deserves quoting in full for those of you who do not click through to comments:
Today we face the wasteland of a nihilistic official art world, daily on display at such sites as Art Forum or vernissage.tv, ruled by an Academy far more oppressive than any of the past owing to its belief in nothing more than the recitation of Soros/Code Pink politics and the exercise of its own arbitrary power.
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Anish Kapoor in Jerusalem

By Heddy Breuer Abramowitz Having outgrown the starter apartment of its youth, the Israel Museum has re-opened after a three year makeover.  The vision of Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s legendary mayor, it was built in 1965 before there was a collection to house. Teddy’s own “Field of Dreams” proved true, he built it and they came. So many works of art, archaeological finds from the world over, Judaic artifacts,  bequests and visitors jammed the galleries and storerooms of the museum that it simply overran itself.  Continue Reading