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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Elizabeth Bishop, Poet-Painter

WE KNOW ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-1979) as a poet.  An eminent woman of letters, she was poet laureate of the United States (1940-50) at a time that title carried weight. Deeply private, she avoided publicity as well as the public, steered clear of academic and literary discourse. She deflected blatant biographical interpretations of her work, refusing […]

Grashow vs. Ozymandias

A READER EMAILED ME TO TAKE ISSUE with a comment in the previous posting on James Grashow. The complaint was that my phrase create for the ages was a tad “overblown.” Point taken. Perhaps it would have been better, not so grandiloquent, to have said simply create for tomorrow. Create for the world our children […]

James Grashow’s Corrugated Fountain

“Everything in the cosmos exists to emerge as a Book” If Mallarmé were writing today, he might want to change that to Film. James Grashow worked for four years on “Corrugated Fountain, “ an installation of melancholy and ephemeral beauty. A lifelong woodcutter, he carved-and-pasted the work out of corrugated cardboard in anticipation of its […]

Thornton Willis at Elizabeth Harris

WHAT WE LIKE TO CALL THE “MODERNIST GRID” is really not modern at all. It is the application to painting of a structural pattern that is so ancient it can almost be thought of, in Platonic terms, as an Ideal Form. Grid patterns determine the layout of streets in antiquity on different continents. The grid […]

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, […]

Dolls, Dames and Scholarship

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION features an article on an instructional project by a Hamilton College sophomore. She put some minimal geometry to work to create a life-sized Barbie scaled to the original. The result is a sculpted tutorial intended to let us know that female eating disorders have little to do with food. Just […]

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