October 1, 2020 Look The Later Work of Dorothea Tanning By Craig Morgan Teicher Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, 1942. © ADAGP, Paris. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the archive of the painter Dorothea Tanning, with whom my wife, the poet Brenda Shaughnessy, had had a twenty-year friendship, and who I had gotten to know toward the very end of her life. Dorothea, who died at a hundred and one in 2012, was profoundly intelligent, funny, mischievous, and in possession of her full creative powers almost until the very end. In her late eighties, when her hands were no longer steady enough to paint, she switched to poetry and published two extraordinary collections in her nineties. Her archive is housed in the Destina Foundation offices in downtown Manhattan. As I visited the space and spent some time with the work, I had a socially distant conversation with Dorothea’s archivist, Pam Johnson, who showed me some of the late works on display. First a little background on Dorothea. She was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1910, and first gained notoriety in the early forties with what is still her most famous painting, the self-portrait Birthday. She made her way to New York as a young woman and fell in with the European surrealists who had fled the Nazis. One of them, Max Ernst, visited her studio in 1942 and was astounded by Birthday. That was the start of their thirty-four-year relationship and marriage, which would take them from New York to Sedona, Arizona, and to France, before Dorothea settled in New York after Ernst’s death in 1976. She began as a surrealist, as Birthday, with its winged monkey, endless doors opening into the distance, and botanical dress, makes clear, but the late paintings and fabric sculptures on view in her archives were ample evidence that she moved far beyond her beginnings, into realms for which I’m not sure there’s a handy label. Read More
September 24, 2020 Look David Hockney’s Portraits on Paper By The Paris Review Opening next week at the Morgan Library & Museum, “David Hockney: Drawing from Life” is the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s portraits on paper. Spanning more than half a century, the works showcased in “Drawing from Life” see Hockney returning again and again to some of the individuals he holds dearest: the designer Celia Birtwell, his friend and former curator Gregory Evans, the printer Maurice Payne, his mother, and himself. Evident everywhere is Hockney’s mastery of color and his devotion to capturing the subject at hand. A selection of images from the show appears below. David Hockney, Self Portrait with Red Braces, 2003, watercolor on paper, 24″ x 18 1/8″. © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt. David Hockney, Gregory, 1978, colored pencil on paper, 17″ x 14″. © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt. Read More
September 3, 2020 Look A Tree Is a Relative, a Cousin By The Paris Review “When that first photograph was taken of Earth from space and you saw this little ball in blackness,” said the artist Luchita Hurtado in a 2019 interview, “I became aware of what I felt I was. I feel very much that a tree is a relative, a cousin. Everything in this world, I find, I’m related to.” This relationship with nature—the human body mingling with the landscape, the landscape blending with the body and assuming its dips and swells—permeates Hurtado’s paintings and drawings. A friend of Frida Kahlo, Isamu Noguchi, and many other luminaries of the art world, Hurtado continued to refine her practice, largely in private, right up until her death in August at the age of ninety-nine. “Luchita Hurtado. Together Forever,” which showcases work from more than half a century of her career, opens at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location on September 10, 2020. A selection of images from the show appears below. Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, ca. 1960s, graphite and charcoal on paper, 18″ x 24″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane. Read More
August 12, 2020 Look Renee Gladman’s Sentence Structures By The Paris Review In 2013, Renee Gladman began drawing a series of dense, looping works that assume the characteristics of handwriting but prove to be indecipherable, a sort of scrawled sprawl of imagined structures. To readers of her Ravicka novels, which take place in a fictitious city-state full of surreal architecture and impossible phenomena, this should sound familiar; no matter the medium, Gladman pursues the limits of language, form, and communication. A selection of these drawings appears in Image Text Ithaca Press’s lovingly constructed One Long Black Sentence, printed in white ink on black paper and accompanied by a contribution from Fred Moten. Below, take a look inside the book. Read More
July 30, 2020 Look Masks at Twilight By The Paris Review In the final years of his life, Paul Klee’s productivity skyrocketed. Fearing suppression by the Nazi party, the beloved Bauhaus instructor had fled Germany and returned to his home city of Bern, Switzerland, where he struggled with an autoimmune disease and watched Europe backslide into another war. “Late Klee,” on view by appointment at David Zwirner’s London gallery through July 31, focuses on his output from this period. Abstract yet immediately striking, these late works display Klee’s continued experiments with line and his interrogations of mortality—both the world’s and his own. A selection of images from the show appears below. Paul Klee, pathetische Lösung (Pathetic solution) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner. Paul Klee, Schema eines Kampfes (Diagram of a fight) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner. Read More
March 18, 2020 Look Another Siberia By Sophy Roberts Cold, cruel, impenetrable, abandoned, scored with desperate romance and ill-fated rebellions: modern perceptions of Siberia remain a study in cliché, the everyday bypassed in favor of the sensational. Siberia is a word filled with so many connotations, it is easy to forget about the people who live in its reality. Thirty years after the fall of communism, we are still attached to the dominant images from its past, the mass killing, ecological catastrophes of big industry, and Stalin’s limitless ambitions. Beyond the occasional revolutionary, despotic leader, literary giant, virtuoso pianist, or Bolshoi ballerina, we tend to think of Siberia in general terms rather than specifics. We think of the Soviet collective rather than the individual—as communist ideology always intended. Read More