Art History

Latest Articles

Review: Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies

Linking movies and Cubist painting
Picasso seems to have done so, though preferring Chaplin slapstick and cowboy silents to artsy fare, and biographers place him at several screenings of Lumière shorts.
By GERALD PEARY | June 24, 2010

Random stuff

Versteeg’s ‘In advance of Another Thing,’ ‘Sitings 2010’ at RISD
If you were going to create a portrait of the Internet, what would it look like?
By GREG COOK | April 28, 2010

Pardon the interruption

Quartet of Happiness, Jerry Leake, and Jazz Week
Maybe it was when saxophonist Kelly Roberge, instrument in hand, leapt off the Cambridge YMCA Theatre stage in the middle of a performance by the Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra and fled the auditorium — as if in extreme gastro-intestinal distress.
By JON GARELICK | April 22, 2010

Review: Neil Young Trunk Show

Traveling down no "No Hidden Path"
If a Neil Young neophyte can find himself rocking in a cinema seat to the spirited, soulful music performed in this second of a rumored triptych of Demme-directed, Young-starring concert documentaries, long-time fans are bound to break their armrests.
By BRETT MICHEL | March 17, 2010

Cubism and collage

M.F. Husain at Brown, Keith Waldrop at AS220 Project Space
Maqbool Fida Husain has long been known as one of the grand old men of Indian art.
By GREG COOK | February 24, 2010

Cut it out

Collage-making is about the details
"Collage: Piecing it Together" at the Portland Museum of Art is a somewhat rambling look at a process that came into use in the beginning of the 20th century as a cubist process bringing images, colors, and shapes together that were previously used elsewhere.
By KEN GREENLEAF | January 06, 2010

Alternative universe

Boston Expressionism in context
In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.
By GREG COOK | December 16, 2009

Arc printing

David Driskell’s PMA retrospective
For more than 50 years David Driskell, in his art and his distinguished academic career, has been a creative force in the intersection of modernist art and the African diaspora.
By KEN GREENLEAF | November 18, 2009

Building up

Inspired modernists Cutler and Thon
In the current show at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery at the Maine College of Art in Portland, we see two generations of 20th-century modernist painting.
By KEN GREENLEAF | August 19, 2009

Growing Maine art

PMA exhibit examines the influence of colonies
Long ago an art critic of my acquaintance remarked that New York was a border town to Europe, and until fairly recently that was true. Artistic ideas would be born in Europe, often France, and migrate slowly across the Atlantic and take root.
By KEN GREENLEAF | August 05, 2009

Bill Frisell | Disfarmer

Nonesuch (2009)
Guitarist Frisell is one of jazz's great impressionists, and here he has the perfect subject for one of his audio mini-movies: the eccentric Arkansas portrait photographer Michael Disfarmer.
By JON GARELICK | July 15, 2009

Primitive soul

Anne Siems and the folk revival
Anne Siems's paintings are time machines teleporting you back to the early days of our American republic. In her show at Walker Contemporary, the German-born, Seattle-based artist channels the endearing awkwardness of artists like John Brewster Jr., who roamed NE at the start of the 19th century painting portraits.
By GREG COOK | July 14, 2009

More than words

The Farnsworth's Robert Indiana retrospective
What are we to make of Robert Indiana? His is generally considered part of the Pop art group of artists who came into prominence in the late '60s, along with Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, and though he is not perhaps as highly regarded in the art world, he has a wider popular following than any of them.
By KEN GREENLEAF | July 08, 2009

Viva Modernism

'Vida y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints' and 'Viva Mexico!: Edward Weston and his Contemporaries' at the MFA
Long before the threat of swine flu, Mexico was the scene of an outbreak of a very different kind: Modernism.
By EVAN J. GARZA | May 12, 2009

Hoopleville Pop Art

Hoopleville
Revolving sandwich
By DAVID KISH | May 07, 2009

The power of 'Cool'

A contemporary-art show at Bowdoin is a must-see
"New York Cool" is required viewing for anyone who has an interest in contemporary American art. Comprised of nearly 80 works, the show, at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through July 19.
By KEN GREENLEAF | May 18, 2009

Fabulous fakes

Author confronts his Facebook impersonator and reviews her exhibit
The e-mail from "Craig Cook" arrived on March 2. It directed me to a Facebook page pretending to be Greg Cook's, and a YouTube video. I was busy, so I watched only the beginning of the latter.
By GREG COOK | April 13, 2009

To have and to hold

Stephen Prina at Barbara Krakow, 'Architecture of Fragments' at The New Art Center
Stephen Prina is many things: artist, musician, Harvard professor, socialite, bon vivant. His artwork extends across a number of media, with multifarious influences.
By EVAN J. GARZA | April 01, 2009

Restoring a master

A new biography seeks to redefine Marc Chagall's place in art history
When Marc Chagall died in 1985 at the age of 98 he was internationally famous, wealthy, and had lived to see a museum built for him by the French government.
By KEN GREENLEAF | March 30, 2009

Solved?

Ulrich Boser takes on the Gardner heist
In the wee hours of March 18, 1990, two men posing as police officers gained entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tied up the two security guards, and stole 13 pieces of art.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 18, 2009

Altered states

Talking drugs, Zen, and painting with art critic Ken Johnson
Talking drugs, Zen, and painting with art critic Ken Johnson
By IAN PAIGE | March 04, 2009

Great walls

Epic visions of contemporary China at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum.
"Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection" at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum opens with a pair of interesting choices.
By EVAN J. GARZA | February 27, 2009

Old school

Dyer's thing was watercolors and gouaches of romantic fairy tale country cottages, snowy mountain lakes, and ruins of old stone arches and doorways.
Back in 1928, a Providence Journal headline dubbed painter Hezekiah Anthony Dyer a "militant anti-Modernist." Modern art was just about showing off, he said.
By GREG COOK | February 10, 2009