Diebenkorn in New Mexico (Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, up through Saturday). Fifty glorious abstract paintings and drawings by Richard Diebenkorn, a great American artist who made the professional mistake of spending most of his career in California. No matter how good they are–and Diebenkorn was as good as it gets–West Coast artists find it hard to get East Coast critics, curators, and dealers to take them seriously. A case in point is this tightly focused show of works made between 1950 and 1952, when Diebenkorn was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. It belongs in a major museum, but instead it’s being exhibited in a university gallery. Go see it there, far from the madding crowd, and marvel at the impenetrable mysteries of art-world politics (TT).
Archives for February 20, 2008
TT: Almanac
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
Henry David Thoreau, journal, Dec. 28, 1852