David Ebony— How important is drawing for a sculptor? Among the most subtle of contemporary American abstract sculptors, Martin Puryear has produced elegant and sometimes astonishing drawings and prints over the past fifty years. The two-dimensional works often correspond to his sculptures, but they are not mere studies for 3-D
If you are in or near New York City – or plan to be over the next week – you have the marvelous opportunity to see photographs taken in Calcutta by Laura McPhee at The Benrubi Gallery in Chelsea. And – it gets better – you have two chances to
David Ebony— As Performa 15, the performance art biennial, gets underway this week in New York, on the West Coast, Los Angeles’s Fowler Museum at UCLA hosts “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art,” an extraordinary look at the use of masks in contemporary performance art, sculpture, photography, installation and video.
David Ebony— An eccentric heiress with an all-consuming passion for avant-garde art and artists, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) just happened to change the course of 20th-century art during her tumultuous lifetime. She befriended, sometimes bedded, and often financially supported some of the most important artists and writers of her day. She
David Ebony— A latecomer to the art scene, Barnett Newman (1905-1970) held his first solo show in 1948, at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery. He made a formidable impact on the art world when he introduced in that show the controversial works for which he is best known today. Decried
Our special correspondent David Ebony is recently returned from Venice where he took in the sights and sounds of the Biennale, and was generous enough to share his reactions with us. David Ebony— Ever controversial, the Venice Biennale is the largest and arguably the most important exhibition of contemporary art on the
David Ebony— The advent of affordable television sets in the late 1940s and ’50s, and network television programming aimed to enthrall the masses, arguably had the most significant cultural impact on the planet since the invention of movable type. The powerful new medium quickly became the primary source of news,
David Ebony— From the late 1920s through the 1930s, Mexican artists Diego Rivera (1886-1957), and his wife Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), were one of the most famous art-world power couples on the planet. At the time, Rivera was internationally recognized for his monumental public murals featuring poignant socialist themes. Kahlo at
David Ebony— Merging the worlds of architecture, art, and design in a unique way, David Adjaye is very much in the spotlight these days. The African-born, London-based starchitect seems to be everywhere lately. His work, and that of his firm, David Adjaye Associates, is currently the subject of a major
David Ebony— One of the country’s foremost art critics and art historians, Michael Fried is no stranger to controversy. His essay on contemporary art, “Art and Objecthood,” featuring a revisionist view of modernism, caused a stir early in his career when it was first published in 1967. Fried argued against