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Rosalyn Schwartz on Caspar David Friedrich
I first discovered the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich in the mid-1980’s when I was an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis...
Raoul Middleman on Rembrandt
The most puzzling aspect of the The Night Watch is the figure of the small girl, the so-called mascot of the civic guard...
Zaria Forman on William Bradford
In July 1869, American painter William Bradford, alongside photographers John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson, embarked on the first expedition to the Arctic devoted principally to art.
Ken Buhler on Andrew Pfriender
One wintry Sunday afternoon in the mid-1980’s, some friends and I piled into a car and headed up Rte. 17 into the Catskill Mountains. In a couple of hours, we exited at Loch Sheldrake, NY, and found our way to a rural mobile home belonging to Andrew Pfriender, aka Grandpa Pfriender.
Ellen Altfest on Francois Boucher
I’ve always disliked the Rococo, and pretty much any artist who paints pink cheeks (Rubens, Renoir, Hals, etc.). For me, it’s not the pleasure, desire, or playfulness of the Rococo and other similar confections, but it is the one-note, overly-sweet eagerness to please that irritates.
Margaret Grimes on Ruth Miller
The still life paintings of Ruth Miller are at first glance deceptively modest. On closer viewing however, they have a compelling power comparable to a gravitational pull.
Barbara Zucker on Florine Stettheimer
I walked into MOMA in 1976 and fell in love: with a painting. It was a coup de foudre. The first thing that drew me to it was the wacky, white scalloped frame.
Catherine Howe on Charles E. Burchfield
Burchfield explained, “To the child sitting cozily in his home , the roar of the wind outside fills his mind full of visions of strange phantoms and monsters flying over the land.”
Richard Estes on Bernardo Bellotto
There is a small painting by Bellotto at the Chicago Art Institute - a view of a street in the small town of Pirna, Germany a short distance from Dresden - that I used to see every day when I was a student there and which always fascinated me.
Jacqueline Gourevitch on Piet Mondrian
This Mondrian has a marvelous, lilting, adventurousness to it: an improvisational, searching liveliness. These are life enhancing qualities.
Joyce Kozloff on Miriam Schapiro
Among Miriam Schapiro’s works, the black paintings are my favorites. Although she often used color ecstatically, I never felt it came to her easily.
Richard Haas on Jan van Eyck
The challenge to an artist to think about his or her influences is such a central one that it immediately sends a stream of thoughts about a seemingly endless number of artists through one’s head.
Amy Weiskopf on Carlo Carra
If Pompeian still life frescos and Cubist still life paintings had a baby, Carlo Carra's Natura Morta con la Squadra would be that child.
Virginia Wagner on Doron Langberg
We know that, under those rough, hasty marks, the scene exists in all of the intricacies of life.
The Mute Shape of Exteriority: Jennifer Coates on Paul Gauguin
By probing into visionary states through the psychological or magical effects of color, not just through the depiction of women experiencing a shared hallucination, Gauguin veers into abstraction.
Julia Jacquette on Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
I get teary eyed every time I see it – the relaxed confidence and gentle smile with which Labille-Guiard has depicted herself.
Peter Saul on Paul Cadmus
Paul Cadmus’ Coney Island was the first picture I ever saw, in 1939 when I was 5 years old.
Phyllis Bramson on Henry Darger
Henry Darger is a self-taught artist whose life's work was discovered in his Chicago apartment in the months before his death in 1973.
Gregory Amenoff on Pieter Bruegel
First off, let’s get one thing straight. The Low Countries are aptly named. They’re low. No mountains at all. None!
Lesley Dill on Agnes Martin
I am writing about Agnes Martin because her work approaches me initially where I think I live, a place of attained quietness through years of meditation.