Artforum Magazine

THIS MONTH IN PRINT

Cover: Alex Katz, Ada’s Black Sandals (detail), 1987, oil on linen, 48 × 60 1⁄8". © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Dear readers,

“Stop saying stupid shit.” So begins Derek McCormack’s profane hymn to Vivienne Westwood, the keystone of Artforum’s package devoted to the mutineer couturier. McCormack wants us to quit the platitudes, to do Westwood right by adopting her “Destroy” heuristic. Westwood’s dexterous and enlightened oppositionality finds good company in the February issue, where Sarah Schulman writes on the early work of the brilliant insurgent Nicole Eisenman and Dodie Bellamy tackles the singular art of Joan Brown. On the cover is Alex Katz, another artist committed to cutting his own path. He’s feted here by four uncommon painters: Sam McKinniss, David Salle, Amy Sillman, and Jamian Juliano-Villani. “We need to be moved because we need to move on,” writes McKinniss, who is taken by Katz’s desire to go places “unstable and terrifying.” It’s a call for our arts to uproot and usurp, to push us to burn the barren past, to stop saying stupid shit.

—David Velasco

ON THE COVER

Alex Katz, Paul Taylor Dance Company, 1963–64, oil on linen, 84 × 96". © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Four Painters on Alex Katz “Katz was not, and still is not, a Pop artist, being much too invested in the depiction of observable, local phenomena involving light and color, his friends and family, his natural or citified surroundings.”
—Sam McKinniss

FEATURES

Looks from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Autumn/Winter 1982–83 “Nostalgia of Mud (Buffalo)” collection. Photo: Robyn Beeche.

Remembering Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022) “You could say the words on the shirts were there to communicate something, but you’d be wrong. This wasn’t communication; it was spectacle.”
—Derek McCormack

Nicole Eisenman, Untitled (Lesbian Recruitment Booth), 1992, ink on paper, 24 × 19".

Sarah Schulman on Nicole Eisenman in the 1990s “Nineties lesbian radicality eschewed the causal explanations of both nature and nurture. We just declared ourselves to be.”
—Sarah Schulman

Joan Brown, Thanksgiving Turkey, 1959, oil on canvas, 47 7⁄8 × 47 7⁄8". © Estate of Joan Brown.

Dodie Bellamy on the art of Joan Brown “I expect to feel thrill and awe; I want to depart teary-eyed. ‘Joan Brown’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did not disappoint me.”
—Dodie Bellamy

COLUMNS

Edward Hopper, Approaching a City, 1946, oil on canvas, 27 1⁄8 × 36". © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Thomas Eggerer on Edward Hopper “Stillness at the threshold of movement is a crucial feature in the illusionistic dramaturgy of Hopper’s work.”

Gerhard Richter, Hofkirche, Dresden (Court Chapel, Dresden), 2000, oil on canvas, 31 1⁄2 × 36 5⁄8". © Gerhard Richter (0012).

Harmon Siegel on Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History “Whatever hope we have of understanding what criticism can mean today, we should find it there.”

Jean-Marie Straub, France, 2002. Photo: Richard Dumas/Agence VU/Redux.

J. Hoberman on Jean-Marie Straub “Straub had a certain truculence: ‘If we hadn’t learned how to make films, I would have planted bombs.’”

REVIEWS

Robert Colescott, Tobacco: The Holdouts (detail), 1987, acrylic on canvas, 90 × 114". © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of The Trust and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo, and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.

Plus more from New York, New Paltz, Ithaca, Cambridge, Saint Louis, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Bogotá, São Paulo, London, Bristol, Llandudno, Paris, Bordeaux, Valencia, Florence, Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Mumbai, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Sydney

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