CBS News chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa visits an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., that explores the trail of paper works the artist left behind, and talks with curator Adam Greenhalgh, and with the artist’s children, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, about Rothko’s remarkable vision.
October 8, 2023–January 15, 2024
Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston reports for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Through Jan 13, 2024
Ruscha, now 85, talks with correspondent David Pogue about collecting much of his life’s work into one retrospective; the cryptic nature of many of his paintings; and his use of unusual materials (like chocolate and axle grease).
“I don’t have any Seine River like Monet,” Ed Ruscha once said. “I’ve just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.” ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN will feature over 200 works—in mediums including painting, drawing, prints, photography, artist’s books, film, and installation—that make use of everything from gunpowder to chocolate. Exploring Ruscha’s landmark contributions to postwar American art as well as lesser-known aspects of his more than six-decade career, the exhibition will offer new perspectives on a body of work that has influenced generations of artists, architects, designers, and writers.
In 1956, Ruscha left his hometown of Oklahoma City and drove along interstate highway 66 to study commercial art in Los Angeles, where he drew inspiration from the city’s architecture, colloquial speech, and popular culture. Ruscha has recorded and transformed familiar subjects—whether roadside gasoline stations or the 20th Century Fox logo—often revisiting motifs, sites, or words years later. Tracing shifts in the artist’s means and methods over time, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN underscores the continuous reinvention that has defined his work.
Shara Hughes was born 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
She describes her lush, vibrantly chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as “invented landscapes.” Full of gestural effect, surface tactility and possessing a fairytale mood of reverie, these paintings, as the New Yorker described them, “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.”
Bold, clashing colours and shifting perspectives manifest into dream-like landscapes that push and pull the eye across the canvas, challenging conventions of space. Rather than depicting true to life landscapes, Hughes invites us into a fantastical world offered as a portal for psychological discovery and reflection.
Both his technical approach to painting and his perception of the world from 1930 onwards are greatly informed by the Cape. Cobb’s Barns, South Truro derives its bright palette and topographical features from Hopper’s immediate environment, and is emblematic of the profound influence that life in South Truro had on his manner of painting.
Group of Houses, dated 1923-24, stems from a pivotal stage in the development of Edward Hopper’s career. Residential homes occupy much of Hopper’s subject matter in these early watercolors, and Group of Houses is no exception. These charming saltbox houses are typical for the Cape Ann region, whose architectural style reflects its coastal New England atmosphere.
The Battery, Charleston, S.C., dated 1929, is the result of Hopper’s three-week stay in the charming southern city, which is renowned for its Georgian-style architecture and cobblestone streets lined with lush palm trees. His Charlestown pictures possess an inherently tropical feeling, which sets them apart from his otherwise New England-focused oeuvre.
Red Barn in Autumn Landscape is among the limited number of watercolors that Hopper completed during the fall of 1927 in Vermont, and embodies the rustic quality of the New England scenery that drew Hopper to this region in the first place. Hopper routinely sketched his surroundings in coastal towns on the Cape or along the Maine shore, but Red Barn in Autumn Landscape is quite unique in that it captures a specific fall moment as the leaves gradually fade from green to burnt orange and red. The present work is emblematic of the simplicity and charm that characterize Hopper’s New England watercolors.
April 9 to August 12, 2023
Reuniting works on paper that are often seen individually, along with key paintings, this exhibition offers a rare glimpse of the artist’s working methods and invites us to take time to look.
Over her long career, O’Keeffe revisited and reworked the same subjects, developing, repeating, and transforming motifs that lie between observation and abstraction. Between 1915 and 1918, a breakthrough period of experimentation, she made as many works on paper as she would during the next four decades, producing progressions of bold lines, organic landscapes, and frank nudes, as well as the radically abstract charcoals she called “specials.”
Even as she turned increasingly to painting, important series—including flowers in the 1930s, portraits in the ’40s, and aerial views in the ’50s—reaffirmed her commitment to working on paper. Drawing in this way enabled O’Keeffe to capture not only nature’s forms but its rhythms: tracing the sun’s spiraling descent in vividly hued pigment, or committing to velvety black the shifting perspective as seen from an airplane window.
Discover the important role working on paper played in Georgia O’Keeffe’s life and career.
In this Expert Voices, art historian and Director of Leo Castelli Gallery, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli shares her interpretation of Figures, recalling her memories working with her husband and Lichtenstein whom she felt was a modest and dedicated artist, and among those that changed the path of American art in the postwar period.
A key figure in the Pop art movement and beyond, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) grounded his profoundly inventive career in imitation—beginning by borrowing images from comic books and advertisements in the early 1960s, and eventually encompassing those of everyday objects, artistic styles, and art history itself. Referring to Lichtenstein’s equalizing treatment of the subjects he chose for his art, Richard Hamilton, a fellow Pop artist, wrote in 1968: “Parthenon, Picasso or Polynesian maiden are reduced to the same kind of cliché by the syntax of the print: reproducing a Lichtenstein is like throwing a fish back into water.”
DAMIAN ELWES is a British/American artist with studios in Santa Monica and Colombia.
Elwes chooses a moment in time when an artist is at their most inventive and then examines what was going on in their studios.
Why is Winslow Homer a household name in the USA? And what makes his art so important? Follow Homer’s journey, at a time of great upheaval in American history, from magazine illustrator to sought-after artist in oil and watercolour.
Winslow Homer: Force of Nature Ground Floor Galleries Until 8 January 2023
Milton Avery is considered one of North America’s greatest 20th-century painters. Milton Avery: American Colourist is the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in Europe.
It brings together a selection of around 70 of his most celebrated paintings featuring landscapes, portraits, scenes of city life and studies of the human form. Take a tour of the exhibition with curator Edith Devaney, advisor to the Milton Avery Trust Waqas Wajahat, and Avery’s grandson and artist Sean Cavanaugh.
Boomers Daily 