Stories | Art Review
Rembrandt All Over
Published Feb. 24, 2010
In the late 1640s and 1650s, the Netherlands’ prosperous Golden Age dimmed. Hundreds of businesses failed, and a major recession enfeebled the entire society. Even Rembrandt, renowned and rich, hit a wall, partly of his own ...
Claiming Space
Published Jan. 28, 2010
A few years ago, when the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown converted the Santa Fe Depot’s old baggage-claim area, it did what museums all over the country have been doing in recent years, from remote, high-desert ...
Shooting the Moon
Published July 8, 2009
One of Ansel Adams’s most familiar and famous images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, is the photographic equivalent of Aaron Copeland’s orchestral suite Appalachian Spring, John Ford’s movie Stagecoach, or Edward Hopper’s painting of a corner diner, ...
Considered Beautiful
Published Feb. 26, 2009
In 1810, a black Khoisan woman from South Africa named (by her slave-master) Saartjie Baartman was brought to London and became an entertainment sensation. Kept ... More Post a comment
How Many Words Is a Picture Worth?
Published Oct. 29, 2008
Photographs and words have been doing their rather stiff box-step dance since the beginning. In the 1840s, Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative-to-positive process, ... More Post a comment
Vaporous Volumes
Published June 18, 2008
Asilk thread seams together the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, the tarot, feminism, and Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer whose impresario activities in the early 20th ... More Post a comment
The Ghost Brought Inside the Flesh
Published May 12, 2008
I’ve seen every cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and yet when I watched his new-absolutely-last-I-promise director’s cut, I’d never felt so pierced by the ... More Post a comment
Oversoul
Published Feb. 27, 2008
When the painter Asher Durand first journeyed to New York as a teenager in 1817, from his rural home in Essex County, New Jersey, the ... More Post a comment
Hell-Bent Voracity
Published Feb. 20, 2008
Why is it that the most intimate, mysterious performance photographs are of jazz musicians? Maybe because two things get exposed at once: the expressiveness of ... More Post a comment
Leica Spirit
Published Feb. 6, 2008
During off hours while working as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange before the outbreak of the Great War, the young André Kertész took ... More Post a comment
Indigenous Material
Published Jan. 23, 2008
A Mexican woman in traditional Indian garb, loose long hair swaying, strides past stone outcroppings toward the Sonora Desert, like a pilgrim or wanderer, except ... More Post a comment
Southland Art
Published Jan. 16, 2008
In the 1950s and 1960s, several Bay Area painters — David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and others — were working to revivify traditional figurative ... More Post a comment
