Gabrielle Schwarz

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  print March 2023

  Helen Saunders

  When the Vorticist manifesto was published between the puce covers of BLAST in June 1914, there were two women among the eleven signatories: Jessica Dismorr (1885–1939) and Helen Saunders (1885–1963). However, Saunders’s name was misspelled: “H. Sanders.” It’s tempting to read this as an act of erasure—whether careless or intentional, perhaps inflected with misogyny—by the famously egotistical Wyndham Lewis, who once declared that “Vorticism was . . . what I, personally, said, and did, at a certain period.” (Saunders saw things differently, describing the short-lived movement as “a group of very

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  picks February 01, 2023

  Joseph Yaeger

  There’s a creeping sense of unease in “Time Weft,” Joseph Yaeger’s show of twenty-five new paintings, occupying all five levels of the Perimeter’s converted mews-house space. We see the right arm of a man in a white lab coat holding out a pill in his palm; a close-up of a woman staring ahead, ice-blue eyes frozen, face splattered with a black viscous substance; another woman, a Hitchcockian blonde, whose eyes are covered by the hand of a man standing close behind her—all painstakingly rendered in watercolor on gessoed linen. The surfaces have a scratchy, slippery, luminous quality, like old

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  print December 2022

  Carolee Schneemann

  “I’m a painter,” Carolee Schneemann once said. “I’m still a painter and I will die a painter.” Right up until her death in 2019, the artist insisted on the centrality of painting to her wide-ranging and profuse body of work. Across six decades’ worth of performance, film, photography, drawing, sculpture, installation, artist’s books––and, yes, some painting––she always maintained that the eye and hand of Schneemann the painter could be discerned: in her work’s intimate tactility, in its attentive treatment of color and form, and often also in the literal presence of paints or painterly apparatus.

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  print September 2022

  “The Baroness”

  WHEN I WAS / YOUNG—FOOLISH— / I LOVED MARCEL DUSHIT / HE BEHAVED MULISH—. This snippet of poetry by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is printed on a wall next to the bathroom door at Mimosa House, beside a projection of Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of an upturned urinal signed R. MUTT 1917. The proximity of the Baroness’s handwritten lines to the widely known signature underscores their remarkable similarity: a nod to the spirited debate that has emerged in recent years about the true authorship of the most famous art object of the twentieth century. Did Marcel Duchamp steal the credit

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  books January 24, 2022

  Duchamp and Circumstance

  MARCEL DUCHAMP, BY ROBERT LEBEL WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP, ANDRÉ BRETON, AND H. P. ROCHÉ. New York: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2021. 252 pages. 

  TOWARD THE END of his life, in 1966, Marcel Duchamp was asked why he had never had a solo exhibition in his native France. “I don’t know. I never understood. I think it’s a question of money,” he replied. “The dealers have nothing to gain from me. . . The museums are run, more or less, by the dealers.”

  This candor was calculated, all part of Duchamp’s schtick. Since the mid-1920s—after a terrifyingly productive decade in which he reimagined Cubist painting,