Professor Sandler locates the aesthetics and values of the New York School within the context of the postwar milieu.

GIORGIO MORANDI: Resistence and Persistence BY SEAN SCULLY On the occasion of Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 16 to December 14, 2008, we post abstract painter Sean Scully’s 2005 essay on his Italian forebear. This essay was first published in Sean ScullyResistance and Persistence: Selected Writings Edited by Florence Ingleby, (Merrell,…

It may not be a fair comparison but you can’t help wondering: How can the Whitney Biennial be so exciting and the Tate Triennial so tedious when both are showcasing the same kind of contemporary art on either side of a well-traversed pond?

Can an artwork, and by extension the artist, be considered obsessive? James Siena: Selected Paintings and Drawings, 1990 – 2004, the artist’s 2004 mini-retrospective at Daniel Weinberg’s L.A. gallery would certainly seem to beg the question. Fastidiously installed in the gallery’s two exhibition spaces, the nineteen modestly scaled works – none larger than 29 x 23 inches – contain thousands upon thousands of concentrated brushstrokes.

New York Studio School 8 West 8th Street New York NY 10011 212 673 6466 February 17 to May 7, 2005 The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture is housed in a nationally land marked building on 8th Street – a maze-like architectural wonder that combines four Victorian townhouses, mews carriage houses,…

“Dalí: Mass Culture” continues at Fundació “la Caixa” until May 23, traveling thereafter to the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Salvador Dalie Museum, St Petersburg, Florida; and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. “Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years” C&M Arts until June 5 (45 E 78th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212 861 0020…

Can video become the new painting? Not just in the art scene, where video takes an ever larger slice of the exhibition pie, but in the aesthetic sense as well. “Autumn Almanac,” a recent show by Jeremy Blake at Feigen in Chelsea has me wondering.

Emotional intent is often ascribed to a sensitively rendered line, but to what extent can we say other information – intellect, curiosity, politics – are being transmitted in that same line? Put another way, how much of the spectrum can touch occupy in imparting content to a work of art? The question comes to mind thinking about “Global Networks”, the Independent Curators International exhibition of Mark Lombardi’s work at The Drawing Center in Soho, where twenty-five major drawings by the late artist are currently on display.

Ellen Berkenblit has been one of my favorite artists for years. I visited her studio once in the mid-nineties, and have done my best to see her shows whenever possible. A painter of expressionist, hermetic narratives, Berkenblit’s work can be simultaneously colorful, dark, moody, and humorous. With her recurring cast of characters – that include…

Whatever it says in “The Wasteland,” from an art critic’s point of view, August is the cruelest month. Even the lingering group shows, the staple summer fare, peter out in the weeks before Labor Day. After Labor Day, la deluge, but when New York newspapers that usually don’t venture north of 90th Street start to…