Jason Rosenfeld
JASON ROSENFELD, Ph.D., is Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College. He was co-curator of the exhibitions John Everett Millais (Tate Britain, Van Gogh Museum), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and River Crossings (Olana and Cedar Grove, Hudson and Catskill, New York). He is a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.
BARRY MCGEE
with Jason Rosenfeld
FEB 2018 | Art
“It’s what makes me think about art history as a stacking and stacking, or unstacking, or digging and burying, but to me it’s always stacked until like two minutes ago, when whoever just finished a painting—the most contemporary piece, newest, modern piece of art is being finished right now”.
CATHERINE MURPHY: Recent Work
by Jason RosenfeldFEB 2018 | ArtSeen
There are nine oils and five graphite drawings in Catherine Murphy’s latest show. This includes everything the artist has made since 2013, the year of her last exhibition at the gallery. Everything. The meticulous Murphy, now in her early seventies, has honed her practice to the essentials, documenting the quotidian in her Poughkeepsie environs with more and more of a laser focus, and at an earned stately pace. Five of these works closed out her beautiful Skira Rizzoli monograph, published in 2016, but now they can all be seen together, hanging in generous spaces, and beautifully revealing the continued evolution of her inimitable practice, an exercise in concentration in two mediums.
Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables
by Jason RosenfeldAPR 2018 | ArtSeen
The present exhibition has arrived amidst a contentious national mood, with a divisive President attempting to define not only what makes America great but who constitutes America.
Fast Forward: Painting From the 1980s
by Jason RosenfeldMAR 2017 | ArtSeen
Drawn from the museum’s collection, this welcome forty-work reappraisal of a decade still warily regarded is not meant to be comprehensive, but well lays the groundwork for a fuller consideration.
Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light
by Jason RosenfeldMAY 2017 | ArtSeen
Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804 – 1887) is unrepresented in the Metropolitan’s collection, but owned in depth by longtime supporters of the museum, The George Hearn Trust and Asbjørn Lunde, who have together lent thirteen of seventeen works by the artist in this one-room sparkler of a show.
ALEXANDER CALDER: Hypermobility
by Jason RosenfeldJUL-AUG 2017 | ArtSeen
Alexander Calder (1898–1976) redefined and expanded an entire medium, while fulfilling the purported prime directive of mid-century modernism: abstraction.
HOLLY COULIS: Table Studies
by Jason RosenfeldOCT 2017 | ArtSeen
Still life is a time-worn but hardly vigorous genre at the moment, but Athens, Georgia-based painter Holly Coulis has been inventively tweaking its terms, and never more so than in these new playful and precise works.
Jason Rosenfeld
NOV 2017 | Art
Linda Nochlin was my dissertation advisor at the Institute of Fine Art, New York University. I had been working with her second husband, Richard Pommer, and edging towards specializing in architectural history, as he was such a brilliant scholar and teacher, and had been very supportive of my work—he once said I wrote like an angel.
CECILY BROWN
with Jason Rosenfeld
DEC 17-JAN 18 | Art
“I like my space to be very aggressive, I think, that I play a lot with something—just as you think something is a long way away, it comes right up in your face again.”
MARTIN PURYEAR Big Bling
by Jason RosenfeldJUL-AUG 2016 | ArtSeen
Memorable Mad. Sq. Art projects have abounded, but none impact the environment and relate better to the formal qualities of the park than Martin Puryear’s monumental and terrific Big Bling (2016), which commands the now lush and verdant oval for the next three seasons, and is deeply resonant of life in today’s New York.
The Keeper
by Jason RosenfeldSEPT 2016 | ArtSeen
New York’s most important exhibiting institution without its own permanent collection is at present featuring a remarkably stimulating show about the act of collection and preservation.
Ragnar Kjartansson Scenes from Western Culture/Architecture and Morality/World Light
by Jason RosenfeldDEC 16-JAN 17 | ArtSeen
The Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s fourth solo show at Luhring Augustine is a tripartite serving of oils, videos, and a four-screen film. Concurrent with his survey retrospective at the Hirschhorn Museum, the exhibitions show Kjartansson seeking to redefine the terms of a durational aesthetic engagement through his deeply mindful, perhaps too historically conscious, art, while displaying the multivalent nature of his somewhat uncharacterizable approach.
VINCENT DESIDERIO:
Theseus
by Jason Rosenfeld
FEB 2018 | ArtSeen
The powerful and monumental paintings in Vincent Desiderio’s ninth show with Marlborough Gallery since 1993 reveal his continued fascination with the history of figurative art and a mucky pleasure in pushing copious amounts of oil around a surface.
Thomas Cole’s Journey:
Atlantic Crossings
by Jason Rosenfeld
MAR 2018 | ArtSeen
The exhibition opens with smoke, soot, ash, and steam—the environs of gritty, urban, insalubrious, northern England. These were the byways of Thomas Cole’s Lancashire youth.
ZOE LEONARD:
Survey
by Jason Rosenfeld
APR 2018 | ArtSeen
The relationship between “take” and “make” is essential to Zoe Leonard’s deeply personal, associative, nostalgic, and generous art.
Alexei Jawlensky
by Jason RosenfeldAPR 2017 | ArtSeen
This enlightening, first major U.S. museum exhibition on the artist (and the accompanying, defining catalogue) will not catapult him into the first rank, but it compellingly covers his entire career, with a particularly deep focus on the rocky second half of his life. For Jawlensky, this was a period marked by: exile due to war; the indignity of the Nazis labeling him a degenerate artist, prohibiting him from exhibiting, and crushing his market (although he became a German citizen the next year); and a fatally debilitating arthritis.
Ridley Howard Travel Pictures
by Jason RosenfeldJUNE 2017 | ArtSeen
Athens, Georgia and Brooklyn-based painter Ridley Howard’s first show at Marinaro Gallery is consistently compelling and abundantly aware of the history of art—strengths of a painter in his mid-forties with his own fully developed style.
BLUE BLACK: Curated by Glenn Ligon
by Jason RosenfeldSEPT 2017 | ArtSeen
It is a fraught moment to be discussing race and politics in art. The developing story of the national reassessment of disgraceful Confederate monuments has productively unearthed, for the general public, the symbolic power of art and its propagandistic role in perpetuating systems of power and control.
WALTON FORD
with Jason Rosenfeld
NOV 2017 | Art
Walton Ford’s new exhibition of customarily grand watercolors at Gagosian Beverly Hills is titled Calafia, after the warrior queen in Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Spanish novel Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián).
Walter De Maria and The Lightning Field at Forty:
Art as Symbiosis
by Jason Rosenfeld
DEC 17-JAN 18 | ArtSeen
Land Art now helps us see the very best of the planet more resolutely: its innate drama and its benign disregard.
Gods and Mortals at Olympus: Ancient Dion, City of Zeus
by Jason RosenfeldJUNE 2016 | ArtSeen
Gods and Mortals at Olympus marks the welcome return, after a four-year hiatus, of the Onassis Cultural Center to Midtown’s museum scene. Happily, the exhibition continues the Onassis tradition of attractive and engaging historical shows that speak to the cultural and political present.
Turner’s Whaling Pictures
by Jason RosenfeldJUL-AUG 2016 | ArtSeen
In 2008, the Metropolitan’s survey of the British Romantic painter JMW Turner (1775 – 1851) revealed him, in his exceptional blend of literature, landscape, history, morality, politics, and technical experimentation, to be the great Western artist of the first half of the 19th century. And, like Titian, or Caravaggio, or Rembrandt, or Matisse, an artist for all time, continually relevant to the changing human condition, and with an oeuvre ripe for focused explorations of various aspects of his career.
Valentin de Boulogne Beyond Caravaggio
by Jason RosenfeldNOV 2016 | ArtSeen
Black first became stylish in western art in Rome in the beginning of the 17th century through the paintings of an artist from near Milan, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction
by Jason RosenfeldDEC 16-JAN 17 | ArtSeen
Francis Picabia (1879 – 1953), whose mother was French and whose father was a Cuban-born Spaniard, also described himself as being both Italian and American, and his art is no less polyvalent. MoMA’s monstrous, thought-provoking, and at times thrilling survey—with its formidable catalogue—demands focus, commitment, and an open mind; and provides everything you need to assess this unsung hero of an undefined modernism. Best known as an associate of Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and a progenitor of New York proto-Dada around World War I, Picabia is newly revealed in this retrospective of 241 works, exploring the artist’s entire career through oils, drawings, printed publications, film, associations with music, theater, and dance, enamel paintings, photo-based work, spoken word compositions, and correspondence.
RSS
