I’ve been studying Aztec art for decades. Many artists active in or familiar with the Chicano arts movement of America’s Southwestern states have appreciated the blunt figurative style and bold colors of the Aztecs. As African art influenced European artists to establish cubism, so too has Aztec art given inspiration to Mexican-American painters and print makers from the late 60’s…
On December 6th the British Tate Gallery will be announcing its winners for this years celebrated Turner Award. Of the artists on the short list to fame and monetary reward (around $48,000 US), not a single painter appears. Most of the postmodern conceptualists in the running have entered video installations. We’re told that politics abounds in the entries… as with…
“The spectacle… in ideology, art and culture, turns the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. ln this area, however, consumer society performs a…
German Expressionist artists like Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, George Grosz, and Max Pechstein had a profound influence on me over the years. In 1918 Pechstein wrote, “Art will no longer be considered, as it has been in the past, an interesting and genteel occupation for the sons of wealthy loafers. On the contrary, the sons of common people…
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp called a porcelain urinal art and entered it in a New York exhibit. He signed his “ready made” artwork, R. Mutt (a pun using the German word for poverty, “armut”). Eighty seven years later Duchamp is acknowledged as the spiritual father of today’s postmodern conceptualist artists… with one important distinction. Duchamp loathed the bourgeois art establishment…
Diego Rivera painted his glorious oil painting, Nude with Calla Lilies, in 1944. Rivera was known as a fiery radical and an artist who helped create a national art for his Mexican homeland… a genre of social realism that’s come to be known as the Mexican School. Rivera painted an endless number of monumental fresco murals and easel paintings that…
Throughout her long working life as a photographer, Dorothea Lange produced some of the most riveting photographic images in history. She documented the great depression in the US, the internment of Japanese Americans, strikes and workers on relief, the armies of unemployed and displaced farmers who left the dustbowl states for California. An extraordinary woman with enormous talent and a…
To grand applause New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), reopened in midtown Manhattan on November 20th, 2004. Home to works of art like Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Matisse’s Dance (1909), and Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), MOMA possesses a world class collection like no other. But there is another side to…
