A survey of African American art, now in New York, “succeeds brilliantly” in capturing the spirit of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It also reveals the dilemma those artists felt about focusing on “overtly racial subject matter” versus art “unconstrained by ethnicity”. Probably unresolvable, the issue nonetheless stimulated a “collective mass of respectable efforts” that helped a few “to reach the stars”.
Houston scores a double hit. A show of Jasper Johns drawings “dazzles. He captivates us with things we’ve known all our lives.” But that’s not all. The show inaugurates the Menil Drawing Institute, the first museum in the US specialized in contemporary drawing. Namechecking the renowned Vienna museum, one critic gushes “This week at the Menil, America gets a modern Albertina.”
Not a review of Delacroix the precursor to modernism. Rather, Sillman gets into his head. He was “frail, sexist, … a snob [with] bombastic ambitions. In other words, he’s full of it.” Delacroix “made the picture plane something “bloody and animal and hot. His famous idea was that paintings are bridges to the souls of the spectator [but] his paintings are more like planks thrown over his own abyss.”