Is there anyone in our Manhattan art world who does not know Irving Sandler? Much loved, he is our Vasari, the tireless chronicler  who attends every lecture, goes to every show, and knows every artist and critic. In this well illustrated book, a revision of his classic The Triumph of American Painting, he focuses on 1942…

Like some earlier Guggenheim exhibitions, Mark Rosenthal’s 1996 splendid, mindless history of abstraction and the more recent survey Russia! are two examples, The Third Mind presents much great art without a convincing visual premise.

Pinocchio’s nose grew when he lied, and so he is a perfect role model for this artist whose magnificently chaotic installation presents the truthful lies of art

Some may remind you of Sam Francis’s Blue Balls, although Winters packs his pictures more densely. And his lavishly worked colors occasionally have some unruly relationship to 1970s pattern painting, the faux-Islamic decorations of Philip Taaffe and, even, the gridded portion of Henri Matisse’s The Moroccans. But whatever his visual sources, Winters makes entirely original, entirely resolved works of art.

The attractiveness of the towering, tree covered mountains in Landscape after Wang Meng’s “Travelers amid Autumn Mountains” is self-evident. But if you cannot also see how this is a copy of a fourteen century imitation of Dong Yuan’s 10th century Travelers amid Autumn Mountains, then who knows what you are missing.

Julie Langsam at Frederieke Taylor

At the end of the Civil War, there were very few significant paintings in America. By the start of the Great War, however, thanks to a surprisingly small group of men and women, the extensive collections we possess today had started to be formed. Cynthia Saltzman, a marvelously writerly writer, has studied the literature, read…

We all know that beautiful artifacts are grand commodities, and so have to be carefully guarded. But by making her sculptures beautiful and menacing, both at the same time, Lou brings home that contradiction.

I enjoyed every word of this beautifully composed book, a virtuoso performance by a writer at the top of his form, who almost never fails to be totally engaging.

Thanks to the very fully annotated correspondence, in 38 volumes, we know a great deal about Marcel Proust’s tastes in visual art. When young he frequented the Louvre, went to the Low Countries and, under the spell of John Ruskin, traveled to see France’s medieval churches. He devoted long essays to Gustave Moreau and Monet,…