Lucio Fontana at the Met Breuer.
There are some melancholy aspects to an elegant retrospective, at the Met Breuer, of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana, who is famous for the monochrome canvases, neatly slashed with knives, that he made—or executed—between 1958 and his death, ten years later, at the age of sixty-nine. One gloom is the awareness that this is among the last of the major shows that the Met will produce in Marcel Breuer’s granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which it has occupied since the original tenant, the Whitney Museum, moved downtown, in 2015. (The Frick Collection will assume the lease next year, while renovating its Seventieth Street digs.) The annex’s offbeat, lively program will be missed, having featured cleverly themed historical shows, mostly of painting (“Unfinished,” in 2016) or sculpture (“Like Life,” last year), and revivals of what could be termed second-tier canonical artists whose virtues may have been unjustly neglected. The retrospective, two years ago, of Marisa Merz—like her husband, Mario Merz, a practitioner of Arte Povera, the carefully shaggy Italian answer to American minimalism—was revelatory. She proved to have been the most appealing artist in an otherwise all-male movement.
“Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold,” crisply curated by Iria Candela, is less auspicious, though it is instructively timed for reflecting on recently changed perceptions of modern art. Conveniently, the chaste brutalism of the Breuer building—finished in 1966, the year that Fontana won the Grand Prize for an Italian painter at the Venice Biennale—feels perfect for it, as it did for Merz’s show, housing a period style in period style.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin February 4, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin February 4, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Thataway Thomas McGuane
The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca.
THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN
“Megalopolis.”
THE THEATRE - PHOTO REALISM
Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries.”
AGE OF ANXIETY
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
FAMILY PORTRAIT
In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.
EYES UP HERE
The perils and pleasures of a nice rack.
A CRITIC AT LARGE SAY THE WORD
Why liberals struggle to defend liberalism.
A REPORTER AT LARGE YOU MAKE ME SICK
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
THE WORLD OF TELEVISION CASTOFFS
REALITY-TV CONTESTANTS ARE BARELY PAID, AND THE EXPERIENCE CAN FEEL LIKE ABUSE. SHOULD THEY UNIONIZE?
SHOUTS & MURMURS IDENTIFIED
A panel of scientific experts commissioned by NASA to study unidentified anomalous phenomena,” more widely known as UFOs, said Thursday that it found no evidence that any of the reported objects were extraterrestrial in origin.