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Two Poems by Rae Armantrout -- now at the Fortnightly Review! Like and subscribe! open.substack.com/pub/fortnigh...

submitted 11 hours ago • 0 comments

The Fortnightly Interview: Answering History with Robert Pinsky open.substack.com/pub/fortnigh...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #50: Jeremy Frey's baskets seen on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. Always happy when basketry or quilting or glass-blowing gets a shout-out from a major arts organization. The play with form and pattern, the care of craft! Like pots, the baskets really come alive in groups. #art

submitted 63 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #49: Peter Reginato's sculpture is sproingy & colorful while still very modern. When he paints in enamels—pouring and dripping he makes his own visual language out of bars of color, loops, lobes, and lines. I love the alternating crowded and open spaces and—wow the color pallatte! #art

submitted 64 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #47: Cate Simmons, Persephone's Journey. Kara Walker's not the only artist breathing life into the old silhouette form. I proposed this for the annual English Department tee shirt one year, but a colleague really put her foot down about Virginia Woolf, so we went that way instead. #art

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #46: In a film I once saw a curator ashamed to admit how much Emily Young's work won him over—carving stone was, in his opinion, old hat. Young likes the work to look old—fragments are part of the aesthetic. She also understands that stone by itself is hard to beat for beauty. #sculpture

submitted 66 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #45: Leopold Segedin, Follow the Leader. Part of a series set in west side Chicago where Segedin grew up in. The women in this image belong in their environment, either matching its colors or complimenting them. The grey-suited men are as out of place in color as in gesture. #chicagoart

submitted 67 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #44: Birds, Eggs & Dominoes with Pyramid, 1963. Abercrombie was known as the "queen of the bohemian artists" in midcentury Chicago & had a vocabulary of figures—cats, moons, clouds, pyramids–that she turned into landscapes charged with meaning always about to be revealed. #surrealism #art

submitted 68 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #43. Martin Ramirez doesn't get much play outside of the outsider art scene, but wow, does the work reward attention. He's obsessive about trains but what he's really great at is building up a composition out of curved lines that form ridges, tunnels, funnels of smoke. #art #outsiderart

submitted 69 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #42 - Christmas edition. You want a nativity scene, you've got your pick of good ones. I like Fra Angelico's, partly because it has wonderful halos and glorious Byzantine gold, but it keeps the scene modest & low key. Also, it puts animals at the visual center. Why? Dunno. #art #nativity

submitted 70 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #41: Gustavo Perez is probably the leading ceramic artist in Mexico. His vessels bend, fold, crease & open up in surprising places, really capturing the fluid nature of clay before it's fired. All of this contrasts with the gloss and shine of flat colored glaze. Love it! #art #ceramics

submitted 71 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #40: WW1 turned Louis Monza into a pacifist & his figures shelter in little pockets of safety in a strange world. Sometimes they're trapped, too. The colors in 1968's Nightmare seem at odds with the title. But the faces in the landscape are right out of De Quincey's opium nightmares. #art

submitted 72 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #39: Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog has mystery & vast sublimity —but you know what's best about it? It graces the cover of a Mekons album that some of the band signed for me last night when they dropped by to pick up a Wesley Kimler collage. #artsurprise

submitted 73 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #38: I see Fred Greene Carpenter's landscapes from time to time & have a little one from his trip to the holy land. 1955's "The Valley of Hinom" takes us to a place of dark mojo in the Bible. Figures are stiff & formal, perspective flat, and that spash or sacrificial red ominous.#art

submitted 74 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #37: Arnold Saper, Satomi, etching 1970s. Saper loves to draw & his etchings—often self-portraits or dragonflies—usually have a loose line. Early ones like this have a more precise look. I love the contrast in values—the hair vs. all that white. I believe this shows his wife. #Canadianart

submitted 75 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #36: Remedios Varo The Juggler 1956. Varo's architecture remind me of de Chirico, except her space is alway more populated. One of her signature images is a small, confined space, often a carriage or vehicle sheltering us in a strange world. I'm sure her refugee experience plays into it.

submitted 76 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #35: Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2006. I can't think of a more successful public sculpture from this century. Unlike with Chicago's big Picasso, people didn't need to learn to love this: they were in from day one. First you see the city reflected, then you walk up & see yourself. #publicart

submitted 77 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE 34: Japanese prints! What’s not to love? This one is all about the contrast between interior and the big open world. The bowl & draped cloth imply an intimate world protected & confined by those walls. And beyond? It’d like one of those European ‘world landscapes’—all possibility. #art

submitted 78 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #33. Caillebotte gets how to use those verticals to make work feel like work: a long day of scraping. He elongates one worker’s arms via forced perspective to make us feel the effort. Not a lot of color to give relief, but there’s that one tilted head: cracking wise or just yapping? #art

submitted 79 days ago • 1 comment

ART INLIKE #32. Turner, Surf, 1842. And by “1842” I mean “1842?!?” Turner was so ahead of the game in letting brushstrokes look like brushstrokes that a story does round of a dowager pointing to a blurry bit on a canvas and howling “WHAT is THAT?” & the artist replying “That, madam, is paint” #art

submitted 80 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #31: Charles Ray is a fave among 'one liner' artists... people whose work doubles down on one big idea. I recall seeing his 1993 Fire Truck outside the MCA & thinking the place was burning down. But the truck looked off... it's a blown up version of a toy. You can buy a model! #art

submitted 81 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #30. Edgy & unnerving, Kara Walker's 1994 ‘Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart' took silhouettes used for genteel 19th c. portraits & used them to show the power dynamics of race. I'll never forget it. #art

submitted 82 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #29: Pietro Liberi The Venetian Victory Over the Turks in the Dardanelli. In 1656 Venice trounced the Turks & did not want you to forget it. This vast stonker of a painting launched the "instructions to a painter" genre of poetry, huge in the 17th/18th c. and utterly forgotten today. #art

submitted 83 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #28. Autumn on the seine at argenteuil by Claude Monet (1873). I believe it was Cezanne who said "Monet is only an eye—but my God, what an eye!" And it's true—there's no deliberate intellectual program to the work, still less is there moralizing. I'm good with this. #art #impressionism

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #27: Christo Running Fence 1976. I saw the film of the making this astonishing thing when I was a kid and was astonished at how angry it made some of the locals, and gladdened when one of the ranchers through whose land it ran declared it so beautiful he slept beside it. I would too. #art

submitted 85 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #26: What I really love about painting is what I really love about calligraphy: the gesture of the brushstroke. It's like improvisation in music—something completely in-the-moment but also something that comes from years of attentive practice. Green Flow, Don Reichert 1980. #art #abex

submitted 86 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #25. Ann Shanks, Hide and Seek in the Coliseum, 1956. I love when the Cartier-Bresson street spontaneity of a photo also has a lot going on formally. Here it’s all in the Z axis (the line heading into the depths and out to us), the arc, and that one guy’s pivot left. Vectors! #art

submitted 87 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #24: Rita Cameron started as a representational painter then moved into abstraction. I always see her images as 'abstracted-from' a scene. This one, so fresh it's still in the studio, has everything I like in a good cityscape: space opening out or being blocked in by solid planes. #art

submitted 88 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #23: Sonia Delaunay Electric Prisms 1914. I can't think of anyone but the Robert and Sonia Delaunay who came out of Cubism as into color as angles. I can look at a painting like this for ages, the different color relations finding themselves. I see it as street lamps in mist. #art

submitted 89 days ago • 1 comment

ART I LIKE #21: Calder's 1973 Flamingo is a master class in siting art. It's in Chicago's Federal Plaza, surrounded by austere black Mies van der Rohe modernism on a featureless rectangle of space. Curves & color pop & the scale of the piece (53 feet) means it more than holds its own. #art #Chicago

submitted 90 days ago • 0 comments

ART I LIKE #20: If asked for one work of art that nails what art should be, I'd try to get out of answering. If you stood me a drink, I'd confess: Calder's Circus. He came from a family of monument-making sculptors & was better than any of them while making the opposite of monuments. #art #circus

submitted 91 days ago • 1 comment