John RUSSELL
12 articles
A Novelist's Eye in Isabel Bishop Art
By John RUSSELL
One of the great standard pleasures of life is the sight of free human beings walking around in a defined but open space. This pleasure was fundamental to ancient Athens. It was common form in Rome until the invention of the automobile. All the great European cities have allowed for it.
New York Times • page 20 • 1,178 words
ART: MODERN MUSEUM STAGES MOTHERWELL SHOW
By John RUSSELL
THE good news from 11 West 53d Street is that the Museum of Modern Art is back in business again after having been closed for a time following the Picasso show. Now many an old favorite is on the wall in its accustomed place and an exhibition called ''The Painter and the Printer: Robert Motherwell's Graphics'' is on the third floor. Unlike virtually every other show that the museum has put on in its 50 years, this one was not prepared by its own staff. It is sponsored by the American Federation of Arts and curated by Stephanie Terenzio, assistant director of the William Benton Museum at the University of Connecticut. It consists of 90 graphics and some prints dated somewhere between 1960 and 1980, and it comes with a luxurious catalogue ($14.95 in paperback) that includes some seductive color plates, a catalogue raisonne of 234 items, an introduction by Miss Terenzio and interviews not only with Mr. Motherwell himself but also with 12 of those most closely associated with his print making, whether as printers or publishers.
New York Times • Arts • page 22 • 1,005 words
ART: PRINTS OF ALECHINSKY IN MODERN RETROSPECTIVE
By John RUSSELL
Looking at a new print by Pierre Alechinsky is like getting a letter from someone we know well and cannot hear from too often. We know the handwriting, we know the turn of phrase, we know the probable sequence of ideas. Even the marginalia fall just where we expect them to. Familiarity has staled none of this. If our friend has more to say at some times than at others, and if occasionally he repeats himself - well, those things are a part of friendship, and we're certainly not going to hold them against him. It is clear from the retrospective exhibition of Alechinsky's prints at the Museum of Modern Art that the image of the letter writer is not so far from the truth. Ever since it first surfaced in the great greasy city of Brussels, just after the end of the German occupation, the art of Pierre Alechinsky has stood midway between writing and painting.
New York Times • Arts • page 20 • 1,109 words
IT'S NOT 'WOMEN'S ART,' IT'S GOOD ART
By John RUSSELL
There are more good women artists in the United States than in any other country. This has nothing to do with the size of the population, or even with the overall number of women artists. It has to do with the quality of the work, but it also involves a social factor, a professional factor, a liberationist factor and even (on one recent reading) a neurological factor. It stands for the demise of an ancient, cumbersome and quite pointless distinction. There is no such thing as ''women's art.'' There is just good art, and a great deal of it is now being made by women.
New York Times • Arts • page 1 • 1,981 words
EXHIBITION
The Modern Drawing: 100 Works on Paper from The Museum of Modern Art
PUBLISHED
28 October 1983
THE OLD MODERN'S FAREWELL: A SHOW OF ITS BEST DRAWINGS
By John RUSSELL
''THE MODERN DRAWING'' is the title of an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art and will run through Jan. 3. After that date, the museum will be closed until the opening of the new building, which is scheduled for next May. The new exhibition might more aptly be called ''The Modern Museum Drawing,'' in that it hews very close indeed to the concept of modernity that was formulated by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's first director. That point of view was shared by colleagues and friends of his, like the late James Thrall Soby, whose bequest to the museum is responsible for some of the more spectacular items in the show, and it has lasted very well. The show consists of 100 ''works on paper'' from the museum's own collection. It begins with Degas, Cezanne, Seurat and van Gogh, and proceeds briskly through movement after movement until it pulls into the parking lot with a group of American artists who first came to notice in the 1950's. The senior artist in the show (Degas) was born in 1834, and among the artists now living no one is less than 50 years old.
New York Times • Arts • page 1 • 1,515 words
EXHIBITIONS
PUBLISHED
10 May 1985
ART: A SHOW OF WORKS GIVEN BY PHILIP JOHNSON
By John RUSSELL
''PHILIP JOHNSON: Selected Gifts'' at the Museum of Modern Art is a fascinating and, on at least one count, a provocative affair. It consists of 40 paintings and sculptures by 31 artists, all given to the museum by Mr. Johnson since 1942. The roster of artists includes some - Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Neil Jenney among them - of whom Mr. Johnson has been a longtime champion. But it also includes many to whom he is not known to have a strong private commitment - Yves Klein, for instance, and Arman, Lucas Samaras, Jim Dine, Agnes Martin, Tom Wesselmann and others. A close look at the checklist will also reveal to what an extent the donor made sure that the Modern Museum got good paintings by the Abstract Expressionists at a time when not everyone thought of them as indispensable. There was work to be done for Mark Rothko and Bradley Walker Tomlin in 1952, Philip Guston in 1956, Adolph Gottlieb in 1958 and Barnett Newman in 1959, and Philip Johnson went ahead and did it.
New York Times • Arts • page 24 • 1,423 words
GREAT SHOWS WERE HERE, THERE AND EVERTYWHERE
By John RUSSELL
Where art was concerned, 1985 was a great year for the airlines. To keep abreast of the times, concerned people had to catch British art in New Haven, the treasures of Liechtenstein in New York, the English country house in Washington, Christo's latest gift wrap on the Pont Neuf in Paris and Indian art in many of its guises all over the United States. The best new installation of contemporary American art was not in this country at all, but in the new galleries devoted to the Saatchi collection in London. The devotee of Spanish 17th-century painting had only himself to blame if he did not high-tail it down to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth. We saw more historic Japanese helmets at the Japan Society in New York than we could hope to find in a tour of Japan, and for the enthusiast of European Old Master drawings a visit to the Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif.,was mandatory. This was not a year for the stay-at-home.
New York Times • Arts • page 31 • 1,507 words
A VARIED AND BOUYANT SEASON IN THE MUSEUMS
By John RUSSELL
OUR museums come in all sizes. Glimpsed from above, the Met looks as big as a small town (which it is). The Frick, the Morgan Library, the Cooper-Hewitt look what they are -great town houses, well-adapted relics of a time when domesticity was written in marble and touched with gold. The Jewish Museum was once a Warburg town house. The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park is a medieval pastiche stuffed and truffled with genuine souvenirs of a European past that predates the discovery of America. At least two of our museums - the Guggenheim and the Whitney - have themselves been claimed as works of individual genius. The Japan Society at 333 East 47th Street is the East in microcosm, and the new headquarters of the Museum of American Crafts, opposite the Museum of Modern Art on West 53d Street, is just as big and buoyant as it should be, given the sass that is built into so much of what is on view there.
New York Times • Arts; Theater • page 27 • 1,224 words
Art: 'The Tables,' At the Modern
By John RUSSELL
LEAD: ANY day when it's not actually raining, you will find an interested and inquisitive crowd of people taking stock of an installation by Tom Otterness called ''The Tables'' that can be seen in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. First seen earlier this season at the Brooke Alexander Gallery in SoHo, ''The Tables'' deserved a larger space, a larger and more general public and an open-air location.
New York Times • Arts • page 30 • 1,439 words
Art: Alison Wilding, Sculptor, at the Modern
By John RUSSELL
LEAD: THE first British artist to be included in the Museum of Modern Art's continuing ''Projects'' series is a 39-year-old sculptor called Alison Wilding. Though she was shown in 1983 and 1986 at the Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York, this is her first solo appearance in an American museum. In its thoughtful, reticent, nuanced and strikingly individual way, it is a great success.
New York Times • Arts • page 24 • 1,409 words
Review/Art; Some New Acquisitions At the Modern Museum
By John RUSSELL
LEAD: With Anselm Kiefer, in painting (through Jan. 3), and Richard Diebenkorn, in drawing (through Jan. 10), the Museum of Modern Art could hardly have a stronger program through the holiday season. But it would be a pity if visitors were to hurry, head down like runaway bison, in those two directions alone.
New York Times • Arts • page 36 • 1,810 words
Critics' Choices for an Arts-Filled Weekend; Museums
By John RUSSELL
LEAD: A museum can be all things to all people. It can show great works of art, one by one, in isolation. It can bring a complete world before us, with paintings, prints, drawings and a learned, unhurrying commentary. It can offer us what has long been well known and loved but not often so well set out.
New York Times • Arts • page 28 • 587 words