The American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is best known for his mobiles—hanging sculptures fashioned from impeccably poised lengths of wire and thin metal plates, usually colored black and red. Taking direct inspiration from Miró, Calder distilled the Catalan master’s biomorphic vocabulary to the point at which Surrealist portent became happy caprice. The mobiles don’t need wind currents to set them into motion; they’re already lighter than air.

You’ll see Calder invent the mobile at roughly the midpoint of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years; 1926-1933,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a transformative moment prompted by a move to Paris.  read more »

Philippe de Montebello stepped up to the podium at the press preview for the exhibition “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions” and looked about ready to keel over. Explaining that he had caught a bug, Mr. de Montebello seemed adrift in a NyQuil haze, his voice croaky and his demeanor sluggish. The eve of a much anticipated tribute to an illustrious career—there are better times to catch a cold.

When Mr. de Montebello announced his retirement almost a year ago, many New Yorkers were taken aback. The museum’s public face and its unmistakable voice (who hasn’t heard those dulcet tones emanating from the nearest audio guide?), Mr.  read more »

The recent discovery of 130-some drawings by Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) has been likened to the unearthing of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The scrabbled fantasies of a schizophrenic and the roots of civilization—how could they not be equally important?

Hype knows no bounds, but the Ramírez find is a pretty big deal. Long known to aficionados of outsider art, his drawings were the subject of a retrospective last year at the American Folk Art Museum. Ramírez’s vertiginous tableaux of caballeros, animals and preternatural, zooming trains prompted far-reaching accolades. The Times claimed him as “one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.” Watch your back, Matisse.  read more »

How much of Paris Hilton’s crotch—you’ve seen it on the Internet, I’m sure—any rational person needs is a question asked by Auguries of Innocence, an exhibition of photographs by David LaChapelle at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Actually, Ms. Hilton only makes a fleeting appearance in what is, essentially, Mr. LaChapelle’s debut as a political commentator. War, he wants us to know, is a bad thing.

A protégé of Andy Warhol, Mr. LaChapelle gained renown as a celebrity photographer. His sleek and porno-wise pictures have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Interview, and have featured, among others, Naomi Campbell, Britney Spears and Jocelyne Wildenstein.  read more »

The first thing you’ve got to say about the Met’s new exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’s paintings, prints and drawings is this: It’s about time.

Over the past few years, a handful of almost surreptitious gallery exhibitions were devoted to the Italian modernist. The pickin’s were slim—10 paintings in each venue, if that—but they were enough to set gallery-goers drifting out in a haze of pleasurable disbelief. Why wasn’t this great—hell, sublime—painter getting the widespread attention he deserves?

The answer isn’t hard to pin down. Morandi painted tenderly choreographed arrays of bottles and boxes and the stray landscape—that’s about it. The pictures aren’t sexy.  read more »

The gallery season is in full swing and promises the usual mélange of novelties, big money, humdrum outrages, and stray oddments of aesthetic reward. Art types—students, collectors, curators, critics, Matthew Barney and Björk—will be navigating the streets of Chelsea, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, and—less so, one feels—57th Street and the Upper East Side. For those with a taste for its quiddities, the art season will, at the very least, entertain.

Brigid Berlin’s exhibition of needle-point pillows, at John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller (Oct. 21 to Nov. 22), is bound to be among the most entertaining. Daughter of Richard E. Berlin (chairman of the Hearst empire in its glory years) Brigid grew up among royalty and privilege.  read more »

Context plays an important role in art. This is particularly true of sculpture; it’s a medium that engages real space—that is to say, a place and our relationship to it.

Philip Grausman’s Susanna and Eileen (1996-1999), two monumental fiberglass sculptures, are on display on the grounds of the Katonah Museum of Art—Susanna on the grassy hill leading up to the entryway, and Eileen in the rear patio.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Mr. Grausman’s portrait-heads would look like at, say, MoMA. Both measure roughly 10 feet high and require a significant amount of viewing distance—they could, I think, command MoMA’s enormous contemporary galleries without strain, and maybe with finesse.  read more »

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), the subject of the MoMA exhibition “Kirchner and the Berlin Street,” is, in the greater scheme of 20th-century art, a minor painter, albeit one with a significant role in the shaping of German Modernism.

Kirchner was a founding member of “Die Brücke” (“the Bridge”), a collective of painters out to upset the establishment with art that was “strange to the normal person”—that is to say, Expressionism.

Kirchner had little formal training. He studied architecture as a sop to his parents, but abandoned it for art and the bohemian life. Along with other members of Die Brücke, including Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein, Kirchner advocated for an unpremeditated, rebellious and harsh aesthetic.  read more »

Felix Nussbaum’s Self in Concentration Camp (1940), a painting included in the exhibition “Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait With Horn” at the Neue Galerie, is as bleak as the title implies. Wearing a wool cap, a tattered jacket and a lean beard, the artist looks askance with steely distrust. In the background, a figure defecates into a large metal can. There’s barbed wire, a sky the color of steel wool and an air of Boschian portent.

Bosch’s hell couldn’t compare with Hitler’s. While studying in Rome, Nussbaum, a German Jew, heard Hitler’s minister of propaganda advocate for the Nazi ideal of art; Nussbaum realized soon enough that neither he nor his paintings fit the standard.  read more »

In the catalog accompanying “The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar,” an exhibition of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the artist holds forth on various aspects of his work—among them, his African heritage, the role of mimicry in art, being a twin, and themes of gender and postcolonialism. He lists as his peers Allen Ginsberg, Britney Spears, Fragonard, Versace and Kara Walker. He’s not crazy about Spike Lee or Titian, and is suspicious of Barack Obama—“his rabbit holes,” Wiley says, “are capable of losing structural integrity by virtue of their own weight.”

Which is to say: Let’s be be thankful that Mr.  read more »