New Art Examiner Without Fear or Favor

by Darren Jones, Contributing Editor,  in Salt Lake City Utah is a romantic wanderer’s grail: its chromatic spectrum, the metaphysical power of its topographies and its geopolitical location combine to make it the nexus of lore and industry which defines the Western United States. Utah’s history has often set epic human endeavor against celestial grandeur, casting this vast territory in …

By Christopher Lynn in Utah Geologically, the state of Utah is a panoply of strata, formations, and colors. From the sterile expanses of the Bonneville Salt Flats, to the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountain Range, to the otherworldly red rock deserts of the south, Utah is constantly and slowly changing. Wind and water contour stone; floods and droughts reveal, …

by Sandra Zalman in USA Historicizing Dada and Surrealism As Barr contemplated his retirement as Director of Collections at MoMA, he chose a young art historian, William Rubin, who was then working on a major study of Dada and Surrealism, to be his successor. In 1966, Rubin was hired as a guest curator for the exhibition Dada, Surrealism and Their …

by Viktor Witkowski in Berlin In 2018, Laetitia Gorsy opened up her gallery She BAM! in the Spinnerei, located in the East German city of Leipzig. Over three decades, the Spinnerei – a former late 19th-century cotton factory – has become a hub for artists, galleries, residencies, other cultural institutions and ventures attracting tens of thousands of visitors from across …

by Vaughan Allen An instantly recognisable woman’s face appeared in two notorious paintings by 19th-century French artist Edouard Manet – but who was she? In Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass, 1862-3) a naked woman nonchalantly disports herself next to two men: the artist’s future brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhoff, and a hybrid of his brothers Eugène and Gustave. …

by Josephine Gardiner in Cornwall The reason why Manet’s painting of Victorine Meurent in Olympia outraged the gallery-going public of 1865 was that it appeared to show a prostitute: the artist included many items which, apparently, were associated with prostitution in mid 19th-century Paris, though their significance would be lost on the modern viewer. Worse, this prostitute showed no sign …

by Stephen Luecking in Chicago There is a romantic notion that art is the last bastion of truly human expression. Consequently, news of inroads of artificial intelligence into art invariably generate apprehensions of AI’s deleterious effect on all things human. At the center of that phobia is the algorithm. Somehow this seemingly mysterious entity has taken the role of a …

A Review of Peter Schjeldahl Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 by Victoria Howard in Cornwall Jarrett Earnest has compiled 100 of the art writings of Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic on The New Yorker. I imagine Earnest and Schjeldahl chose together which pieces would go in the final version. Earnest’s other contribution adds little to the book. …

The Curious Case of the Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence by Caravaggio by Anita Di Rienzo in Milan In 1936 Walter Benjamin published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a short essay on the reproducibility of artistic artefacts through the technological innovations of the 20th century and the consequent repercussions on the art scene. …

by Anna Maria Benedetti in Milan Before flying to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and then to the Louvre, the only painting by Leonardo in the Vatican collections or anywhere else in Rome was exhibited for three months in 2019 at the Braccio di Carlo Magno in St Peter’s Square. The image of San Gerolamo was painted on a …