New Art Examiner Without Fear or Favor

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 …

by Loretta Pettinato in Brescia Translated by Laura Pettinato Starting from January 2020, various Italian cities began promoting different cultural initiatives which revolve around the female universe, to pay tribute to women. Inside the Martinengo Palace in Brescia an exhibition has been organized with artwork from 1500 to 1900, entitled Women in Art. There are 90 paintings by artists such …

by Liviana Martin in Milan Before being closed for Covid19, for a few days the Prada Foundation in Milan celebrated the genius of Kafka with an exhibition conceived as a triptych that includes a film, a soundtrack and an installation. In the novels that make up the Trilogy of Solitude (The Trial, Amerika, The Castle), K. is the initial of …

by Mary Fletcher in Cornwall This video work was first shown as a two-screen installation in PM Gallery London, funded by Film London. The version on Vimeo is a compelling short narrative by the artist with a complex series of images. There is the paper model of the design he is making of an archetypal city. There are shots of …

by Pendery Weekes in Cornwall With shops locked down and transformed into gallery spaces from one day to the next, the Great Exhibition of 2020 surpassed expositions of all time for its extraordinary and extensive size in square kilometres, the largest international exhibition ever opened. Notwithstanding the great expense incurred by this Herculean exhibition, sadly it was also the worst …

by Ivy Leung in Hong Kong Due to the ravages of Covid-19, the Art Basel Hong Kong 2020 held in Hong Kong every March was cancelled. The works of Hong Kong-based artist Andrew Luk (b.1988) and the post-war master Chu Teh-Chun (1920-2014), originally planned to be exhibited in Art Basel, are in the de Sarthe Gallery exhibition, Shifting Landscape. Andrew …

by Annie Markovich When it was possible to visit the Tate in person, toward the end of February, all the press packs for Fons Americanus were gone. A double bill with Olafur Eliasson’s In Real Life drew crowds, and on a Friday night Tate Turbine was packed, hopping with a dance club atmosphere. Massive halls, which seemed to be looking …

ARTICLES: THE ART OF THE NAKED APE Miklos Legrady, Toronto Editor LEONARDO DA VINCI MUSEUM, MILAN Anna Maria Benedetti EVERY JOKE HIDES A TRUTH Al Jirikowic on the movie Joker ISAAC LEVITAN, RUSSIAN MASTER Colin Fell, our new writer in Penzance DEPARTMENTS: 2 LETTERS 4 EDITORIAL BY Pendery Weekes 5 SPEAKEASY BY Jack Balas   REVIEWS: 15 TRAGÉDIE FRANÇAISE Frances …

By Pendery Weekes This issue of the New Art Examiner is unique. Nearly all of us around the world have been under some form of lock-down. Some of us have been confined to our homes, others are allowed to go out for essential food shopping, to pick up medicines at the pharmacy, or to do exercise once a day, others …

NEWS FLASH: SOTHEBY’S AND CHRISTIE’S (ET AL.) ANNOUNCE IMMEDIATE WORLDWIDE PRICE CAP OF $1M* FOR ALL WORKS OF ART, FOR ALL ERAS AND FOR ALL TIME. (*realized gain above original purchase price) Ah, what if? Think about it: an absolute cap of one million dollars (US) in a seller’s profit for any and all works of art, going back to …

by Miklos Legrady, Toronto Editor   Michel Foucault says “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and distributed” (The Discourse on Language, Dec. 2, 1970). American sociologist Herbert J. Gans writes of “gatekeepers”. Repeated complaints from peers tell us that over the last decades, academics restricted art to intellectual values, and in doing so …

by Anna Maria Benedetti in Milan On the first floor of what was once the Convent of the Humiliated, there is a permanent exhibition dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci. The presentation of this new space has recently ended after numerous interventions by authorities from the cultural, artistic and political world. The galleries are in the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum …

by Al Jirikowic, Washington DC Editor Joker, the latest film by Todd Phillips, is a work of art. All the characters carry modern American ‘allegorical weight’. They are metaphorical constructs. I saw compounded layers of inherent mental-social problems, the deft compilation of ‘mental glazes’ layered, as a fine Renaissance painting presents itself, as the actors intimated — simultaneously building cross-referential …

by Colin Fell in Cornwall Before me on my desk as I write is a thin sheet of orange plastic. It is the outline of what was, to a child growing up in England at the height of the Cold War, the known world of Europe. In our geography lessons we would place this template on our paper, and with …

by Frances Oliver I wrote recently about a just republished book from my parents’ art book collection, Saul Steinberg’s Labyrinth. Another of their books I treasure, a very different book that some might find almost unbearable to look at, is Frans Masereel’s Danse Macabre, the drawings that are his own 20th-century version of the plague-inspired medieval Dance of Death. I …