Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea

It was something of a legend to me, resting just on the periphery of my consciousness. It had a weightiness and grandeur that probably exceeded its contents and that were fueled no doubt by its very insubstantiality. There is nothing like mystery to swell the dimensions of the unknown or the dimly glimpsed, and in the murky and turbulent waters left in my father’s wake there was indeed little that was certain to grasp...

Richard Diebenkorn’s canvases, drawings, paintings, collages, prints, and a small number of three-dimensional objects, together created over a half century, function as a superbly coherent body of work. His shifts in emphasis from figuration to abstraction to figuration and again back to abstraction take place regardless of...

It was something of a legend to me, resting just on the periphery of my consciousness. It had a weightiness and grandeur that probably exceeded its contents and that were fueled no doubt by its very insubstantiality. There is nothing like mystery to swell the dimensions of the unknown or the dimly glimpsed, and in the murky and turbulent waters left in my father’s wake there was indeed little that was certain to grasp...

Jackson Pollock’s paintings have endured intense critical scrutiny since their first exhibition, and over the years, through repetition, elaboration, and consolidation of selected propositions, an orthodox assessment of their evolution and significance has become established. There are, to be sure, tensions and instabilities within this prevailing account of Pollock’s oeuvre, and there is considerable disagreement among scholars over some of its details and emphases; but its principal aspects, …