I went to The Morgan Library and Museum this weekend to see the van Gogh “Painted With Words” exhibit. It was great, as was the Charles Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” and the Medieval Illuminations. The building itself is extraordinary, with the newly completed Renzo Piano expansion alone worth the price of admission. Make sure though to look around the original McKim library and study to see masterpieces of a bygone era.
The Morgan Library and Museum
225 Madison Avenue
at 36th St. info
I’m super into Hans Josephsohn. The 87 year old Swiss-based German artist is still working, and has a Peter Markli designed museum housing much of his work in the southern Swiss Alps. There is also Kesselhaus Josephsohn, an exhibition space and foundry in northeast Switzerland, an hour outside of Zurich. Learn more here.
My friend, the artist Rachel Jobe, has created a site-specific, two-part piece for PS122 Gallery. The opening will be Saturday, January 5th, from 5-7PM, with the show running through January 27th.
It was announced last week that The Met will be acquiring the complete archives of photographer Diane Arbus. Through the donation of the Arbus Estate, The Met will receive hundreds of prints and negatives, 7,500 rolls of film and print sleeves annotated by Arbus, plus Arbus’ photo collection and personal papers. The artifacts will be preserved, catalogued and made available to the general public for study and research.
In the past few months I’ve seen numerous articles about Blake’s and his girlfriend Theresa Duncan’s unfortunate suicides this past summer. He was 35. Kinz, Tillou and Feigen pay tribute with a show featuring his unfinished Glitterbest.
I recently saw the Dylan inspired “I’m Not There” and can confidently say that all of those wasted hours pouring over anything Bob Dylan have finally paid off. The film is terrific, with notable characterizations by Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore. Extra bonus points if you get all of the Tarantula references. Oh, and the soundtrack is pretty good too.
Cy Twombly’s show at the Gagosian on 21st street is sparse yet beautiful. He fills the massive space with large paintings on wood that offer a simple, subtle delicacy to the cavernous gallery. The work, very different than his usual scribbled doodles, consist of peonies, “the favored flowers of Japanese aesthetic contemplation.” He achieves a sense of contemplated splendor.
Cy Twombly
“A Scattering Of Blossoms And Other Things” Gagosian Gallery
522 W. 21st St.
German painter Magnus Plessen has a very nice show up now at Gladstone Gallery. His work, which “continues to explore the absence that haunts structures of vision”, takes shape in the form of raw, rough, unfinished figures, with “positive and negative spaces that revolve around the physicality of paint upon a canvas, marking both what remains present and that which has been removed”. The show is very strong, and very interesting, and is yet another example of why German artists are currently at the forefront of the art world.
Alberto Burri, the late Italian Arte Povera artist, will have the first New York exhibition of his work in over twenty years at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in December. The show will span his entire career, with a large amount of works on view from the estate of his widow, Minsa Burri. Burri, a key figure in the Arte Povera movement, displayed an extraordinary “command of a wide variety of materials, including burlap, sack cloth, pumice, tar, plastic, Cellotex (an industrial material), ceramic and glue.” A medic in World War II, much of his work suggests the horror of bloody wounds suffered on the battlefield.
