Influencing Jasper Johns

January 25, 2010 The intellectual influence of Marcel Duchamp over Jasper Johns and other painters who came of age in the 1950s is generally known, but decoding the heritage of various Flags, Targets and other "readymade" images on canvas -- not to mention the monumental According To What -- can still provoke surprise and generate insight into Johns' career. An ongoing exhibit at Washington's National Gallery of Art does exactly that. (Through April 4 at the National Gallery of Art.).. read more...

Muybridge, Marey, Marcel & the Matrix

January 22, 2010

The pioneering motion photography of 19th century researchers like Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge (both 1830-1904) had an explicit influence on the epochal Nude Descending a Staircase and its painterly representation of motion through time. A human lifetime later, the stroboscopic universe had evolved into the bullet-time aesthetic made famous in films like The Matrix.

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Dali’s Chess: Pushing Fingers

January 21, 2010 Enthusiasm for chess ran deep in Duchamp's circles, who spent thousands of hours playing the game and, in some cases, constructing their own unique sets. Salvador Dali engaged the game in 1964 by designing a set for the American Chess Federation that alludes to the function of the chess player -- omniscient and eternal from the perspective of the gameboard, meting life and death in pursuit of an abstract agenda -- as surrogate for the divine.Naturally, Dali developed this the.. read more...

Matta in Miami

January 20, 2010 A major -- not to mention rare -- retrospective of the work of Roberto Matta sheds new light on the Chilean-born painter's oneiric and somewhat obscure eight-decade career. Miami dealer Gary Nader has assembled 50 canvases that span the 1930s to the 1990s to chart Matta's early Surrealist associations, encounters with Marcel Duchamp, apocalyptic "inscape" period, pre-Columbian and political influences and beyond.(Through February 22 at Gary Nader Fine Art.).. read more...

Chess & The Origin of the World

January 19, 2010 On the trail of Marcel Duchamp, art dealer Francis Naumann has diverted his professional attention from chess -- having curated the groundbreaking "Art of Chess" show last year -- to works that, like Etant Donnes, express the character of the vagina. "They are at opposite ends of the spectrum and, as it turns out, opposite ends of the body," he recently told ARTNEWS. "But I see a connection, through Duchamp.""The Visible Vagina" will be on display at both Naumann's uptown gal.. read more...

Christie’s Presents “Art of the Surreal”

January 14, 2010 On February 2, Christie's will hold its 10th annual Art of the Surreal sale dedicated to the work of artists associated with Andre Breton and his circle. Works up for auction include two paintings by Marcel Duchamp's lifelong friend Francis Picabia -- one, Nerii, Duchamp characterized as pointing the way into a third dimension, and is expected to bring $800,000 or more. Multiple canvasses by Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico are also represented, as are single w.. read more...

Dada South

January 14, 2010 Zurich, Berlin, Koln, Paris, New York ... Cape Town. The ambit of dada defied easy geographical classification as well as artistic convention and authoritarian politics, sometimes emerging half a century and half a world away from its Swiss origins. To explore dada's influence on South African "resistance art" and, in turn, echoes of non-Western art on the dadas themselves, the Iziko South African Art Gallery in Cape Town has collected works from the usual suspects (including.. read more...

Disciplined Spontaneity

January 13, 2010 The elegance of chance is on display at New York gallery ZONE: CONTEMPORARY ART, featuring variants on the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse as well as other works created by Jackie Matisse, Sol LeWitt, John Cage and Joseph Beuys. Potentially destructive processes are prominent; one of the Cage pieces was created by pressing glass shards into paper, effectively operating as a meditation on the resultant image as the record of incremental damage to a once-blank surface, whil.. read more...

The Magical Films of Joseph Cornell

January 12, 2010 A rare screening of Joseph Cornell's short films provides an occasion to reflect on the apparent relationships between his artistic preoccupations (assemblage, microcosm, memory) and those of longtime associate Marcel Duchamp (assemblage, "the waterfall and the illuminating gas"). The word "dreamlike" is often used to characterize these blind cinematic anecdotes, where significance is elusive, bound primarily by the film frame; the effect is paradoxically neither purely "reti.. read more...