PARIS â To judge by the marketing hullabaloo, the Leonardo da Vinci retrospective that opens here Thursday at the Louvre should be the visual equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a trumpet-and-trombone choir. Blockbusterâs plastered all over it, and rightly so. Timed-ticket sales for its one-stop run are moving right along.
(Critic's Pick): NEW YORK â The 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci will bring big doings to Paris this fall with the largest-ever and one-stop-only career survey at the Louvre. And New York gets a shot of buzz in advance with the opening at the Met on Monday of a single-painting show of one of the most rawly emotional images in the Leonardo canon.
(Criticâs Notebook): NEW YORK â The exhibition âCulture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019â is a golden anniversary survey of wonderful art from the collection of a New York museum that is in the process of being torn apart.
(Criticâs Notebook): For generations Americans tended to see art museums as alternatives to crass everyday life. Like libraries, they were for learning; like churches, for reflection. You went to them for a hit of Beauty and a lesson in âeternal values,â embodied in relics of the past donated by civic-minded angels.
âThis moment has caught me being as much a citizen as an artist,â said the sculptor Martin Puryear on an afternoon in his studio in New Yorkâs Hudson River Valley early in April. In two days he would leave for Venice to begin installing a solo exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale in which he will officially represent the United States.
NEW YORK â If it werenât for the Met Breuer, New Yorkers might never see exceptional shows like âSiah Armajani: Follow This Line.â Its career survey of this American artist is well-timed for an era of sundering moral confusion and offers ways forward from it.
Carolee Schneeman, a prime mover of performance art, a feminist visionary and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century, died Wednesday at her home in New Paltz, New York. She was 79.
ATLANTA â If you had visited Atlanta in the early 1960s, you would have found drinking fountains labeled âColoredâ and âWhite.â Driving into the city from the airport today you pass signs for Ralph David Abernathy Freeway, Andrew Young International Boulevard, John Lewis Freedom Parkway. As in the country at large, there have been big changes.
By the late 20th century, the MoMA myth had lost credibility. Scholars and artists were revealing modernism to have always been a global phenomenon, emerging across the world in different places, on different schedules.
I would have first seen that photo at some point in the early 1960s. Baldwin was African-American; I was a white kid in the process of working my way through the sociopolitical dynamics of all that through reading him.
NEW YORK â At the Met Breuer, concurrent with the Lucio Fontana retrospective, comes the New York solo museum debut of another Argentina-born modernist, Julio Le Parc.
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