print January 2020

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

IN 1980, I logged a series of firsts: my first flight on an airplane; my first trip to New York (from Los Angeles); my first visit to the Museum of Modern Art. It was all things modern. Everything was new to me.

I was there for the Picasso retrospective, but really only to see Guernica, 1937, before it was shipped off to Spain for good. At the time, no other work in the museum’s collection could have inspired such a journey. I’ve read that Guernica was Faith Ringgold’s favorite Picasso, too. Since then, I’ve been to the museum many times. Some days, when I lived in Harlem, I would visit just for

print December 2018

Kerry James Marshall

1 CHARLES WHITE (ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO; CURATED BY ESTHER ADLER AND SARAH KELLY OEHLER) If you really want to see what DRAWING can be—how image, method, and materiality fuse at the molecular level—Charles Wilbert White Jr. makes it crystal clear in some of the finest artworks ever created.

2 GUSTAV KLIMT (KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM, VIENNA) The Kunsthistorisches Museum built a temporary bridge over a stairway so you could get up close to the wall paintings Klimt produced there between 1890 and 1891. Seen from just inches away, the images are mesmerizing, uncanny. I still don’t understand

print May 2018

“Charles White: A Retrospective”

IN 2017, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a one-on-one exhibition pairing Charles White’s Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man), 1973, a large oil-wash-on-board drawing from its own collection, with a small drapery study on blue-tinted paper by Leonardo da Vinci, on loan from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Royal Collection Trust. The show, curated by artist David Hammons, proposed White’s work as a continuation of the grand tradition of picture making, highlighting the skill, sensitivity, and attention to detail embodied by both works on view. White was, indeed, a master of

print December 2017

The Artists’ Artists

To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select a single exhibition or event that most memorably captured their eye in 2017.

ZOE LEONARD

Rei Kawakubo (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) This exhibition was an ecstatic explosion of imagination and ingenuity with a radical reconsideration of form at its core. Much of Kawakubo’s work is joyful and energetic, yet it is far from escapist; her practice is deeply grounded in the social, aesthetic, and material history of clothing and in the importance we humans have assigned to appearance and comportment.

books September 2016

Marvel’s Black Panther

Black Panther (issues 1 and 2) by Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer) and Brian Stelfreeze (artist), with Laura Martin (color artist). New York: Marvel, 2016. 36 and 28 pages, respectively.

THIS WAKANDA looks a lot like Dubai to me. The African kingdom is, we are told, “the most technologically advanced society on the globe,” and yet in the new edition of Marvel’s Black Panther, the imperial guard is still using spears—albeit ones that also discharge some kind of electric ray. Likewise, hologram-projecting beads just don’t inspire the sense of awesomeness and wonder one might reasonably expect from

print Summer 2014

Kerry James Marshall

But if you start out to “read” a comic, you are starting

out wrong. . . . Comics are to be looked at first . . .

—Samuel R. Delany, Silent Interviews: On

Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and

Some Comics

YOU CAN HIT HARD or be as sensitive and silly as you like. You can be immediate and topical in ways that are less forgiving in, say, painting. For freewheeling cultural and critical commentary, I cannot think of a more flexible platform than the daily newspaper comic. The loosely gridded, standard half page can accommodate an extraordinary variety of styles, subjects, and treatments.

print December 2012

THEIR FAVORITE EXHIBITIONS OF THE YEAR

To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select the single image, exhibition, or event that most memorably captured their eye in 2012.

RITA ACKERMANN

Gang Gang Dance (September 22, Cameo Gallery, Brooklyn) If materialism is the unwanted fat on our spirits, Gang Gang Dance’s music is the blade that cuts it all off. Their sounds burn up that heaviness of need and greed and lift the spirits to other dimensions. A hundred years ago, Rudolf Steiner wrote The Philosophy of Freedom and feverishly lectured about protective space and other visionary ideas to

print December 2004

the best books of the year

WHAT BOOKS STOOD OUT IN THE PAST TWELVE MONTHS? ARTFORUM ASKED A HANDFUL OF HISTORIANS, CRITICS, AND ARTISTS TO NAME THE TITLE (AND, IN SOME CASES, TITLES) THEY MOST REMEMBERED FROM THE PREVIOUS YEAR.

Arthur C. Danto

The title of Joseph Leo Koerner’s extraordinary study The Reformation of the Image (University of Chicago Press) refers to the way Martin Luther “reformed” religious pictures to make them consistent with the Second Commandment, thus protecting them against the wave of iconoclasm that swept Protestant churches in the early sixteenth century. Luther’s remedy consisted in treating images