Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

~~The Cold War claimed its most famous victim on November 22, 1963, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Paranoid theories involving...

Whereas Tintoretto worked on enormous canvases aided in the execution by his techniques for speed and his large workshop, Barocci worked laboriously on his altar-pieces through multiple stages of preparation, carefully calculating especially his affective color. If Tintoretto’s ambition was to engulf his viewers, Barocci’s was to enthrall them.

Despite continuing references in the scholarly and the popular press to the lasting artistic and cultural relevance of Abstract Expressionism, no comprehensive collection of essays related to this movement has been published since David and Cecile Shapiro’s Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record and Clifford Ross’s Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics appeared in 1990...

Much of the cogency of Judd’s best-known essay, ‘Specific Objects’, comes from its being both a statement of aesthetic principle and a broad critical assessment of the new forms of sculpture or three-dimensional art making an impact in the New York art world in the mid-1960s. Because he was trying to explain why he felt impelled to depart from accepted modernist understandings of the art object, the essay has a striking sense of urgency. But it does not deal directly with his own sculpture. …

Judd made his first “new three-dimensional work” in 1962. He built DSS 29 from a red and black wooden rectangular frame that surrounds a four-foot-long black asphalt pipe, which vertically bisects a canvas covered in light cadmium red paint, wax, and sand (fig....

Once Upon a Time. When I first came across the lines by the duke of Aquitaine some years ago, naturally I imagined them in Jackson Pollock’s mouth. They put me in mind of modernism; or of one moment of modernism, which I realized I had been trying (and failing) to get in focus ever since I had read Harmonium or looked at Le Bonheur de vivre. Two things were clarified. Not just that modern artists often turned away from the detail of the world in order to revel in the work of …