All posts by abbymargulies

Blog

Inside Richard Diebenkorn’s Revelatory Sketchbooks

STANFORD, Calif. — A small gallery at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center is currently offering a deeply personal glimpse into the life and work of Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn. Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed is a tiny yet tremendously exciting exhibition that makes public for the first time works drawn from the influential artist’s 29 never-before-seen sketchbooks. The pieces on view, a thoughtful selection of 95 works — including 83 of the 1,045 drawings found in the sketchbooks — reveal an artist who was captivated by the quotidian details of life … Continue Reading ››
Blog

Gazing at Photographs that Look At and Past Us

SAN FRANCISCO — “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me […] It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass,” Ralph Ellison’s narrator declares in Invisible Man. “When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” Published in the early 1950s but set during the Harlem Renaissance, Invisible Man unfolds as a cascading exploration of what it means to be looked at and looked through; ‘hidden’ in plain sight, the narrator … Continue Reading ››
Guernica

The Shark’s Fin

The North Face Meru Expedition, 2011
A new documentary follows three climbers up one of the world’s most challenging peaks to explore the depths of commitment, passion, and calculated risk. On May 16, the rock climber and BASE jumper Dean Potter, along with his friend Graham Hunt, leapt off the edge of Taft Point in Yosemite Valley on what would be their final jump. Though it was a leap that both Potter and Hunt had taken before, something went wrong, and they veered off course, crashing into a rock face before … Continue Reading ››
Guernica

A Battle in Images

Political posters and propaganda on view at LACMA shed light on a tumultuous period in Germany’s history, when art served as a catalyst for change. In the fall of 1918, as soldiers returned home from war and the Western world turned inward to begin its slow recovery, a new fight broke out in Germany. In late October, as Germany’s defeat appeared imminent, disillusioned sailors in the German Imperial Army mutinied, setting off a series of worker strikes across the nation. The country fell into turmoil, and by November, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated power and fled, leaving a flimsy German Republic in … Continue Reading ››
Tablet

Larry Sultan’s Porn Stars, Mezuzahs, Migrant Workers, and Jewish Mothers

In the late photographer’s first career retrospective, the ‘aroma of daily life’ lives forever

Over the course of 35 years, Larry Sultan, the late contemporary photographer, photojournalist, and teacher, turned his lens on subject matter as diverse as his parents, migrant workers, and porn stars, challenging photographic conventions at every turn. Through a striking use of natural light, unexpected composition, and an enthusiasm for mining humor from everyday life, Sultan created photographs that are visually arresting and ripe with narrative possibilities. Among the works in the current retrospective, Larry Sultan: Here and Home, now on view at the Los … Continue Reading ››
The Art Newspaper

San Francisco museum finds 200-year-old DNA in African works

De Young’s research could improve authentication by identifying the species of trees used

de-youngA collection of Sub-Saharan African sculpture from a private US collection has undergone DNA analysis to identify the species of tree used to create the works. The process could be used to authenticate pieces and to provide scholars with more information about the cultures that made them.

The longtime African art collector Richard Scheller, a leading biochemist and an executive vice-president at the biotech corporation Genentech, is working with Lesley Bone, the chief curator at the De Young … Continue Reading ››

Tablet

Is Chaim Soutine the Great Overlooked Jewish Painter of Modernity?

A new gallery show helps reassess the Lithuanian-born artist’s important work—and reveals it as anything but tragic
1bb2011d02ea81728209b8f6652a885cOn a quiet block in Chelsea, nestled among dozens of contemporary art exhibitions, a small but ambitious show has just opened seeking to give one of the great modern masters his due. Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine , on view through June 14 at Paul Kasmin Gallery, is the first in a series of exhibitions the gallery will present meant to re-contextualize the work of Lithuanian-born artist Chaim Soutine. Soutine’s … Continue Reading ››
Brick Underground

John Buffalo Mailer’s Fave Antique: The Typewriter His Dad Used to Write “The Naked and the Dead”

MailerJohn Buffalo Mailer is a renaissance man of sorts, an actor, playwright, editor, and author who lives and works in his native Brooklyn. The youngest child of noted writer Norman Mailer and Norris Church Mailer, Buffalo Mailer has written several screenplays, including "Hello Herman," produced a documentary adaptation of Naomi Wolf's "The End of America," and collaborated with his father on a book of interviews. Most recently, Mailer starred as a young incarnation of his father in Matthew Barney’s epic film "River of Fundament." Buffalo Mailer lives in a two-bedroom apartment teeming with books and … Continue Reading ››
Brick Underground

Peek at artist Dotty Attie’s “mountain man with dementia” home decor in Gramercy

AttiebedroomwallDotty Attie is an artist who, since the 1970s, has been exploring issues of gender identity, politics and culture through thought-provoking works that reimagine famous paintings and photography, combined with original texts. Last year she was inducted into the National Academy, and her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at PPOW Gallery in Chelsea. For three decades she has lived in a four-story 1848 townhouse in Gramercy, where her sons grew up and where her studio is today. An avid collector, Attie’s home is teeming with eclectic tchotchkes and great vintage finds. Her favorite part, though, is a wall in her … Continue Reading ››