A little while ago I went to the Stuart Davis retrospective at the Whitney. I was expecting to like it, and I did. I’ve seen my fair share of Davis’ paintings over the years, and I have particularly fond memories of his solo 1991 Metropolitan Museum exhibition, Stuart Davis: American Painter.

The first Morandi painting that I ever saw was at the Pittsburgh International Triennial Exhibition of 1958. I was a first year art student at Carnegie Mellon University, then called Carnegie Tech.

Charles Burchfield's landscape paintings are riveting. This painting, Sphinx and Milky Way, with its bat-like shapes, celestial falling stars, deep midnight blue and black center, flowers with faces, and symbolic points of light, pulls me in with a kind of intensity I've discovered in few others.

His paintings of the Penn Station excavation, violent and gritty, show the negative side of progress; they’re the quintessential example of man at odds with nature.

It spoke to me directly, which is uncommon for a painting in a museum setting. It was one of us.

I was a young artist in the early 1950’s feeling the weight of a male-dominated art world in places I frequented...

The artist inhabits a post-apocalyptic world where people and objects are empty and degraded. Every volume is a void.

I've always found the painting remarkable for the way Hopper's boat surges with such energy. Any moment it will have sailed out of our view altogether.