John Perreault takes a look at Gutai at the Guggenheim.- In the Winston-Salem Journal, Susan Gilmor tells the story of the campus art collection developed by Wake Forest University students, who just took their quadrennial buying trip to New York. Super-neat read.
- The Art Institute of Chicago has a binder full of women.
- The Archives of American Art pretty much always has great stuff on its blog, including this story of John Storrs, shamrocks and (maybe) a church in Ireland.
- Photographer James H. Evans chronicles Marfa and the Big Bend region.
- As the Clyfford Still Museum unrolls Still’s paintings, conservators are presented with striking challenges — including trying to learn what the heck this black-ish mold-ish stuff is.
- An Andrea Zittel A-Z Homestead Unit was just installed in the sculpture garden of Australia’s National Gallery. Artist Charlie Sofo is living in it.
- Speaking of taking care of paintings, MoMA’s James Coddington and Jennifer Hickey are doing an awesome, fascinating job of documenting their attention to Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950. Geek. Out. (That’s MoMA conservation scientist Chris McGlinchey up there.)
- Same Old Art offers a nice take on painter Svenja Deininger.
- Joerg Colberg picks up a book and makes me want to read it: “Painting and Photography, 1839-1914,” by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, a curator of photography at the Musee d’Orsay.
- I just bought Brad Zellar and Alec Soth’s LBM Dispatch “Three [California] Valleys.” Each is a site rich in American art and photographic history.
- Tony Smith’s One-Two-Three (1976) is on view in New York’s Bryant Park for the next several weeks. Check it out — and earn yourself this awesome t-shirt. (Hear more about a key Tony Smith initiative on The Modern Art Notes Podcast. The Smith segment begins just before the 42-minute mark.)
- Why the Civil War still matters to artists, Dario Robleto edition.
- Matthew Harrison Tedford wanders today’s San Francisco to align the present with Carleton Watkins stereographs.
- It’s nice to see New York discovering John McLaughlin, one of the most underrated artists of the 20th century. (Killer installation shots too!)
March 19, 2013, 8:07 am
I know you don’t have much regard for the MSM, probably especially the WSJ, but this by me was out in the Journal on Mar. 2, and online the evening of Mar. 1:
“One of the photographs in a 1962 Life magazine spread on California painters shows John McLaughlin (1898 – 1962) standing on a sunny golf course near his home in Dana Point. The artist, leaning on a club, looks quite neat and natty in white slacks, yellow polo, and short-brimmed straw hat. Beside him stands one of his typical paintings: a frozen scroll of horizontal white rectangles, with one black band, on a bright yellow ground. If you’ve seen a few of Mr. McLaughlin’s deceptively—very deceptively—simple pictures, you can veritably feel the man’s life-experience (son of a Massachusetts state senator, husband to a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, collector of and dealer in Asian art, U.S. Marine Corps translator in the Pacific theater in World War II, and an artist who painted seven hours a day seven days a week) philosophically distilled onto canvas.
“The mostly self-taught Mr. McLaughlin wasn’t interested, however, in painting his autobiography, but in transcending it. He once said, ‘My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract. I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer’s natural desire for contemplation without benefit of a guiding principle…This I manage by the use of neutral forms.’ The painting on the golf course isn’t in this slender exhibition, but four others are, including a surprising, early (1947) small biomorphic painting, and a 1951 canvas, in black and white, with a circle in it, that indicate how rigorous Mr. McLaughlin’s road to pure rectangles was. For those who enjoy looking for a long time at a few works of art that are exactly right without being finicky or precious, this is your show.”
Of course, I’m an old L.A. guy, and McLaughlin has long been a favorite, so I probably don’t qualify as being part of N.Y.’s “rediscovery” of Mr. McLaughlin.