-
3 weeks ago | 
nytimes.com | Walker Mimms
At the Museum of Modern Art, a watercolor herbarium from 1919 and 1920 flaunts the literal side, and even the preachiness, of abstraction's superheroine. From 1856 until the 1960s, schoolchildren in Sweden had to pass annual botanical examinations quite literally in the field. Each spring they roamed the meadows and forests to collect 50 to 150 specimens, then pressed, annotated and classified those plants in the tradition of that late great Swedish naturalist, Linnaeus.
-
2 months ago | 
nytimes.com | Walker Mimms |Rita Harper
"I don't know how to write," Mary Flannery O'Connor once said. "But I can draw."She had just become a cartoonist for her high school newspaper, at Peabody High School in Milledgeville, Ga. There, and later at Georgia State College for Women, she hoped to place her linoleum-block-print satires of campus life in The New Yorker.
-
Mar 5, 2025 | 
nytimes.com | Walker Mimms
In the film's final shot, the architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) stands squinting atop his latest skyscraper, the tallest in the world, with the wind popping his shirt. Inspired in part by Rand's admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, Roark has battled decades of herd mentality and bland neoclassical buildings in order to assert his vision of a gleaming, geometric Modernism upon America's skyline.
-
Feb 15, 2025 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Walker Mimms
Can American art escape the culture wars? THIS ARTICLE IS FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Panel 10 from Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954–56), Jacob Lawrence. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London 2025
-
Jan 23, 2025 | 
nytimes.com | Walker Mimms
Some museums are encyclopedic. Can art fairs be, too? In 2016, the venerable Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory, which for 60 years was called the Winter Antiques Show, began admitting works made after 1969. Three years later, "Antiques" dropped from the name. Now in its 71st edition, this year's fair, a benefit for the East Side House Settlement in the Bronx, feels like a mini-Met in its geography and generous time span.
-
Dec 18, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Walker Mimms
As the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe and as Joseph McCarthy, a senior Republican senator from Wisconsin, was railing against the U.S. State Department being "infested with communists," an intimidating group of abstract painters were occupying America's galleries.
-
Dec 11, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Walker Mimms
MacDevitt flipped through a stack of Carr's gestural charcoal drawings containing anti-Biblical commandments, from 1974. One read: "You must fecundate and fornicate and know what it means to be afraid." MacDevitt paused on another, depicting a man asleep. Or dead? Tonkovich directed a finger: "In this smudge here I see a funeral pyre, don't you?" he asked. "These drawings are clearly India," where Carr spent a year during the Timothy Leary era. Other canvases target corporate malaise.
-
Dec 11, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Holland Cotter |Jason Farago |Walker Mimms
Say what you will about digital futures, print still rules when it comes to art books. And 2024 has brought us a batch of hold-in-your-hand beauties. They include a souvenir document of a highlight show from this year's Venice Biennale; a jumbo compendium of architectural projects never (often for good reason) realized,a bouquet of tributes to a much-loved gallerist and a book-length exit interview with a veteran art critic: page-turners all.
-
Nov 22, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Walker Mimms
In his mug shot, the photographer George Steinmetz doesn't seem especially threatening. It captures some of the inquisitive humanity that Steinmetz, a tall and direct people's person with a John Malkovich mien, conveys in life. On a recent drive through rural Pennsylvania, he told me how he had gotten himself jailed. It was 2013, and he was photographing wheat fields in Kansas from his motorized paraglider.
-
Nov 20, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Walker Mimms
10 hours ago44 Gilded Age Photos That Reveal The Stark Wealth Inequality Of The EraCoined by Mark Twain, the term "Gilded Age" described the glittering yet corrupt era that defined turn-of-the-century America.The post 44 Gilded Age …4 hours agoChinese Collector Buys Banana Taped To A Wall For ₹52 Crore At Auction, Says 'Will Personally Eat It'The world's most expensive banana just got sold for more than $6 million.
