The following is an expanded version of a lecture delivered in the early 2000s.
When I was a kid of seven or eight, there was a TV show called Ripley's Believe It or Not! I remember being…
Though 21 years dead, Matisse refuses to become historical. An alertness to one or another aspect of his achievements still informs the works and attitudes of contemporary artists of many persuasions…
More than halfway through “Blackness in Abstraction,” an austere photograph by Carrie Mae Weems posed a Mies van der Rohe leather daybed—conjuring a truant psychoanalytic patient, perhaps—against a wa…
One recent afternoon in Donald Judd's old house in downtown Manhattan, the late artist's children—Flavin and Rainer—were discussing their father's career. Flavin has a boyish, unlined face framed by…
In 1965, Larry Bell had his first solo show in New York, at the Pace Gallery. This was a major event for a Los Angeles artist, especially at a time when the art world turned all of its attention…
If a collector wanted to buy a Frank Stella at Art Basel Miami Beach last December, he could have walked up to the booth of New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, which represents Frank Stella. Or, he…