Phyllis Tuchman

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  print March 2011

  Susan Rothenberg

  With a mere twenty-five canvases dating from 1976 to 2008, “Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place” succinctly conveyed how, over the course of the artist’s low-key, four-decade career, she fulfilled her early promise and matured into an insightful, sensitive painter whose latest series may well be her most poignant. This mini retrospective also suggested that the standing interpretations of the sixty-six-year-old artist’s famed early output need revising.

  When Rothenberg’s equine paintings were first shown in 1975 at New York’s 112 Greene Street (and, six months later, uptown, at the former Willard

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  print November 2009

  Robert Morris

  In 1971, when Robert Morris was at the top of his game, he constructed a site-specific installation composed of plywood ramps, beams, balancing platforms, ledges, and a massive sphere for Duveen Hall, the stately entrance to the former Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain). Then forty years old, the erstwhile Minimalist envisioned something more complicated than a mere grouping of geometric forms and shapes. As David Sylvester and David Compton wrote in the exhibition catalogue, the artworks were “a sequence of structures which, although they resemble in their uncompromised simplicity Morris’ earlier

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  print April 1983

  GUERNICA AND “GUERNICA”

  PABLO PICASSO WAS INTERVIEWED by two American journalists soon after Guernica was installed. He discussed politics from his vantage point as an artist:

  As to the future of Spanish art, this much I can say to my friends in America. The contribution of the people’s struggle will be enormous. No one can deny the vitality and the youth which the struggle will bring to Spanish art. Something new and strong which the consciousness of this magnificent epic will sow in the soul of Spanish artists will undoubtedly appear in their works. The contribution of the purest human values to a renascent art will

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  print March 1978

  Background of a Minimalist: Carl Andre

  WHEN THE MINIMALISTS UNSEATED the reigning Abstract Expressionists, the new champions emerged from a field of lighter-weight contenders, including practitioners of Pop, Op, Systemic Painting and Lyrical Abstraction. They not only began to dominate the art scene in the United States, but also attracted adherents in West Germany, Italy and Great Britain. Ironically, Minimalism offered a real style to its camp followers, while the others offered merely a “look.” Although influential for over a decade now, Minimalism is still generally interpreted in formal terms, just the way it was first seen,

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  print May 1977

  Minimalism and Critical Response

  SINCE RATHER EARLY ON, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and others—together with Robert Morris—were singled out by critics and curators as the chief practitioners of a new mode of three-dimensional art. But as Robert Rosenblum pointed out in Partisan Review last winter, “Time creates sanctity and gravity. . . . Already, many sixties artists have taken on, for me, this classical stature—Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Don Judd, Robert Morris, Kenneth Noland, among others—which feels more like past than present . . .” Nevertheless, many of the assumptions which were first propounded about

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  print Summer 1972

  An Interview with Anthony Caro

  ARE THE INTENTIONS OF YOUR figurative sculptures related to your recent work?

  My figurative sculptures were to do with what it’s like to be inside the body. That means, what it’s like to be sitting in this chair, or lying down flat, how it feels to smile. For example, when you’re lying down, you feel heavy; your weight causes you to feel flattened and pressed down. The figurative sculptures were about this sort of thing. But all sculpture in some way has to do with the body. For instance, my sculptures now are partly dependent upon the spectator’s height from the floor when he is standing

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  print February 1972

  An Interview with John Chamberlain

  In working with automobile bodies, did you intend any metaphorical reference?

  No, they’re self-portraits. The portraiture had more to do with the balances and rhythms and spaces and areas and attitudes than it had to do with what one looked like. If you look at the sculptures, you can see that most all the sculptures I do, of one kind or another, have certain kinds of balance or rhythm that are characteristic of myself. That’s the way I feel about it; other people feel differently and read different things. I’ve heard those sculptures referred to as furniture of the highway—all sorts of things

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  print May 1971

  An Interview with Robert Ryman

  Do you make white paintings?

  No, it may seem that way superficially, but there are a lot of nuances and there’s color involved. Always the surface is used. The gray of the steel comes through; the brown of the corrugated paper comes through; the linen comes through, the cotton (which is not the same as the paint—it seems white): all of those things are considered. It’s really not monochrome painting at all. The white just happened because it’s a paint and it doesn’t interfere. I could use green, red, yellow, but why? It’s a challenge for me to use paint and make something happen with it, without

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  print April 1971

  An Interview with Herbert Ferber

  How different has it been, being a carver during the ’30s and now dealing in sculpture more directly?

  THE WORD DIRECTLY IS MISLEADING. How can one be more direct than by carving? Additive sculpture is another misleading term. I can think of collage as a word to be used about sculpture because as in painting, pieces which have an existence of their own are put together, using some form of adhesive as a connecting link. Is that what you mean? Is that the kind of thing you mean by additive? When you build a sculpture up from armature in clay or wax or plaster, by addition, you’re working towards a

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  print January 1971

  An Interview with Jack Tworkov

  DO YOU THINK THAT YOUR experience or observation of art education as a student at the Art Students League during the ’20s was very much different from (or like) your experience as chairman of the art department at Yale during the ’60s?

  Well, I think the whole scene hag changed. No one at that time looked to a university for an art education nor was there any effort to incorporate art into the university system. A student didn’t go to art school to get a degree. There were no grades. There was only the relationship between the student and the teacher and student to student. The student-really went

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  print December 1970

  An Interview with Larry Poons

  HOW IMPORTANT WERE THE DRAWINGS to the dotted grid paintings?

  Not important whatsoever.

  But they were made and they do relate to them.

  It’s like scaffolding, right. When the picture was finished, hopefully, the scaffolding wasn’t to be seen.

  Like structure?

  That’s a kind of simplistic idea of structure. If it’s on graph paper, people feel it’s structure. It’s no more structure than anything else. It’s just a lot of people began to think of structure in terms of if you can count them, if you can subtract them, if you can see the whole canvas divided equally, that’s structure. Now, that’s not structure.

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  print November 1970

  American Art in Germany

  THE ACCEPTANCE—AND APPRECIATION—OF contemporary art has become increasingly more sophisticated in Germany. Fifteen years ago when the First Documenta was held in Kassel, the scale of sponsorship now known would have been unimaginable. Today, it is almost unsurpassable. During the past three years, certain galleries have assumed leadership; prominent collectors have bought art on a grandiose scale; Cologne has emerged as a powerful art center. What is especially remarkable is that many museums are proudly displaying recent art (and they are nobly being assisted with the cooperation of collectors);