Tag: modern art
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Venice Biennale Art Show 2024 – Part 2
My wife and I spent April 2024 in Venice, mostly to relax, soak up history and culture, and indulge in more than a few happy hours, mostly centered on drinking Aperol Spritzes and eating cicchetti, the ubiquitous, cheap and addictive Venetian appetizers. But in addition, we chose April in part because we could attend the…
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Paintings that announce “I’m here”
My most recent post was about the Venice Biennale art show, which my wife and I visited in April of last year. It was a long one, maybe setting my personal blog-post length record, but that was not because I was going for a record (LOL) but because I wanted to talk about a lot…
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Venice Biennale Art Show 2024 – Part 1
Venice – the one in Italy – alternates two huge fairs, the Architecture Biennale and the Art Biennale, in a tradition that dates all the way back to 1893, when it marked the 25th anniversary of the marriage of King Umberto I of Italy to Margherita of Savoy. In April my wife and I were…
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A chalk line from the Met
Book Review: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov, published by Penguin Books, New York 2021. (4 out of 5 stars) This is an interesting, ambitious and mostly well-written book, which focuses on artist Helen Frankenthaler’s early career in the 1950s, when she burst on the New York scene fresh out…
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Gertrude Stein’s entertaining take on Picasso
Book Review: Picasso by Gertrude Stein, published by B.T. Batsford Ltd., London 1938; reprinted by Dover Publications, New York 1984. (4 out of 5 stars) It’s always fun to read reviews of Gertrude Stein’s books, for example on sites like GoodReads that publish reviews by the common rabble. She provokes a wide variety of reactions,…
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The band of palette-wielding buddies in Montmartre
I really enjoyed this book despite initially having some worries. At first it was behaving like a historical novel, because Roe inserted dialogue that seemed to be invented. How do we know exactly what Picasso said to Fernande on a certain day? That concern faded, however, as the book became better documented without being too…
Heard and Seen Around Town 