Tag: Laurie Fendrich

Museum Exhibitions

Art versus politics

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945” an exhibition of more than 70 paintings and sculptures on loan from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, runs on three tracks. The first carries the art, two-thirds of which has never before been seen in the United States. The second, via informative and well-written wall texts, follows political developments in Germany during three-and-a-half fraught decades. The third consists of the imaginations of museumgoers who, like me, can’t help but see similarities between Weimar Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rule and America during Trump’s rise and authoritarian presidency.

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Museum Exhibitions

J.M.W. Turner at 250: Presciently modern

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Some 250 years after the birth of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the Yale Center for British Art has re-opened its renovated Brutalist building with a perfectly scaled, carefully curated exhibition of 77 Turner prints, watercolors, and oil paintings from its collection of his works, the largest outside Britain. 

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Opinion

What the hell is water? How Instagram hurts art

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / For the past eight years, I’ve been merrily swimming along in the waters of Instagram without once stopping to ask what it is. My first post was on December 10, 2016 – five weeks and four days after Trump won his first presidential election, when, like many people, I was devastated. I thought Instagram might bring me out of my post-election torpor. Rapidly scrolling through my feed, posting images (especially of art), seeing what my artist friends were posting, and discovering new art and artists initially felt

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Books

The formidable women who shaped MoMA: Untold stories

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / I didn’t expect to particularly like MoMA’s Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, but merely to learn from it. Turns out I loved all fourteen essays – each by a contemporary female writer, and each about a woman who worked at or for MoMA during the first decades after its founding in 1929. Many are beautifully written. While all are about formidable, pathbreaking women, none are hagiographic.

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Catalogue Essays

Interview: Kathleen Kucka and Janis Stemmermann’s ongoing conversation

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Kathleen Kucka and Janis Stemmermann have been friends for nearly four decades — since they first met as young artists in the 1980s in New York City. “Our life was all about art — figuring out how to get by, make work, see work, and hang out so we could talk about it. In many ways,” Janis told me, “that really hasn’t changed.” This month, on the occasion of “Continuum,” their two-person show at Re Institute in Millerton, NY, we talked about the conversation they’ve been having for the past forty years.

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Opinion

Summer rant: The wrong show

Dedicated to Dr. Ruth (1928–2024)

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / I used my fattest Sharpie to excise the summer group show “Self-Pleasure” at Thomas Erben Gallery – a gallery I have long admired – from my list of what to see. Although the mere idea seems to have sprung straight from the The Onion, holding forth about an exhibition I’ve not seen, as I’m doing here, will strike some as inappropriate or even unethical. Several years ago, in fact, a prominent New York art magazine editor was duly criticized for reviewing a show he hadn’t seen. But I am not writing a review or describing the art in the show, which may or may not be good. I’m commenting on the show’s jejune premise.

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Museum Exhibitions Out of Town

Christina Ramberg’s powerfully personal eroticism

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The erotically charged art of Chicago Imagist painter Christina Ramberg (1946–1995), whose retrospective is currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, aligns chronologically with the second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 80s. Today’s third-wave feminists (some say it’s now fourth-wave) frequently disparage that incarnation of the movement for privileging white women’s worries, and worse, for its obliviousness to institutional misogyny. Fortunately, Art Institute curators Mark Pascale and Thea Liberty Nichols don’t try to pigeonhole Ramberg’s work into that framework. Although she considered herself a feminist, an aggrieved one she was not. Her art was personal, not political, and it doesn’t fit neatly into standardized versions of feminism. Remarkably, the artist found a way to mix together sharp and provocative subject matter about women’s desires with a classical, pristine aesthetic.

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Solo Shows

Diane Simpson’s elegant quirkiness

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / While still in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1970s, the Chicago sculptor Diane Simpson (b. 1935) experienced a serendipitous moment. Through a store window, she caught sight of a child’s chair made from corrugated board. An array of little flutes connecting layers of liner board made the piece unbendable and weight-bearing while keeping it lightweight. Simpson went out and purchased some of the material and shifted from collagraph printmaking – a process that uses a plate with collaged materials – to sculpture. After learning to use a jigsaw to cut the board at a 45-degree angle, she made interlocking flat shapes of her own design, then assembled them into full-fledged sculptures. 

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Opinion

Canceling abstract art in Santa Barbara

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / While there have always been easily discreditable philistines who dismiss abstract art as a fraud, many leaders in today’s art world marginalize it for other reasons. They see it as anachronistic, irrelevant, boring, or, most unforgivably of all, shackled to its white European origins. It’s not far-fetched to think that th

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Interviews

Text and image: Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens

Contributed by Sharon Butler / I had some questions for Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens — artists, writers, spouses who have a two-person exhibition of abstract paintings on view at Texas Gallery in Houston through December 16. After they were evicted from their Tribeca loft a couple years ago, they decamped to Litchfield County, where they both have studios in their home — a beautifully converted auto body shop. In her seventies, Fendrich is a Professor Emerita of Fine Arts and Art History at Hofstra University and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood. After writing regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education for many years, she now writes fiction and contributes art reviews to Two Coats of Paint. Plagens, in his eighties, is the art critic at The Wall Street Journal and is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. My interrogation about the evolution of their painting lives over the course of some fifty years started during an early morning text exchange that became so rich and resonant I asked if Two Coats of Paint could publish an expanded version.

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Museum Exhibitions

Ed Ruscha’s retro spective

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The work of the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha is often referred to as a West Coast version of Pop Art. The implication, of course, is that since it didn’t come out of New York, it must be inferior. His retrospective “Now Then,” his first at the Museum of Modern Art and first in New York since 1983, contains over 200 works from 1958 to the present. It includes paintings, drawings, prints, vitrines with selected self-produced photo-documentary books presented for our perusal, and some film (the Getty Research Institute owns a complete set of Ruscha’s artist’s books). The exhibition also includes the installation Chocolate Room, the walls of which are covered top to bottom with gridded sheets of paper silkscreened with chocolate syrup, recreated from its first iteration at the US pavilion in the 1970 Venice Biennale. Ruscha was also the American Biennale representative in 2017.

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News Comment Writing

On “negative criticism”

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Sean Tatol, the art critic who writes a snarky website called Manhattan Art Review, recently penned a piece for The Point about art criticism titled “Negative Criticism, a sentimental education.” In an era in which many critics prefer to describe work rather than judge it, Tatol’s Manhattan Art Review is notable for the “Kritic’s Korner” — short, sometimes scathing reviews that include a star ranking system: five is great, four is good, three is okay, two is bad, and one is awful. At artnet critic Ben Davis took a deep dive into Tatol’s essay in a two-part piece (one and two), that brings in ideas by other critics who have written on the topic. Davis wonders if “’negative criticism’”’ is the right way to frame the solution, or even if ‘the question of judgment’ is really a full picture of what is at stake.” I asked contributors at Two Coats of Paint if they had any thoughts about the essays or the state of art criticism today, and today we are running responses from critic David Carrier and artist-critic Laurie Fendrich.

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Museum Exhibitions

The real deal: James Brooks reconsidered

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / “A Painting is a Real Thing,” the Parrish Museum’s current exhibition of the work of the Abstract Expressionist painter James Brooks (1906–1992), is his first comprehensive retrospective in 35 years. On the rare occasions I’ve encountered Brooks’s paintings, I’ve paid them scant attention. Like many, I have walked on by, presumptively ranking him well below the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. With this survey of more than 100 paintings, drawings, and prints, I find myself reconsidering Brooks’s status. With the 176-page catalog containing essays by adjunct curator Klaus Ottmann and artist-writer Michael Solomon, the show makes a case that Brooks’s art is more original and important – both within and beyond the context of the AbEx movement – than most of us thought.

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