“…a space opened up behind that paper, a space—who knows how wide—between the paper and the wall, inaccessible but hinted at by the tear. It occurred to me that this photograph was…” Frederick Sommer, “Max Ernst, 1946.” 1946. Gelatin silver print. © Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation. Image courtesy of Bowdoin College Museum of Art, […]

My dad gave me the paper sometime in 2005…and the first “School Papers” pieces are dated January 2006. I’m not sure I thought in terms of notation so much as the paper itself and the fact my dad gave it to me reminded me of my childhood; perhaps that allowed me to begin with a […]

…you can approach the paintings more casually, with a feeling of ease—with the sense that these are sketches for larger works. There is less to recognize. There is less formality. There is less area to navigate. The less here feels more. Alex Katz: Small Paintings 1987-2013 19 September – 2 November ’13 Peter Blum 20 […]

Different from his anyway knock-out show at Pace’s uptown gallery in 2010, Robert Ryman: Recent Paintings at Pace on 25th Street is all the more knock-out because daylight is let in. And this being Ryman, light–its kind and quality–is the whole shebang. Here, natural light makes the six small oil on cotton canvas paintings (2010-’11) […]

Aaron Siskind’s photographs from the post-Photo League years feel at first crowded with big, familiar names: Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman. But Siskind, who understood that paint is paint and the camera is different, made pictures that remain wholly his own. Never mind the pervasive sense of Abstract Expressionist gesture in […]

“Once a book is written, I feel that I have said what I had to say… So I decide that it might be best for me to do something else. Lately, this “something else” has been the making of collages…which now seems to have become a fixed daily activity, and one that I have no […]