Stories by Maureen Mullarkey
Look at Mark Rothko
Is there less here than meets the eye?
May 09, 2016
Impresario of his father’s legacy, Christopher Rothko plays Vasari to papa Mark (1903-1970). Simultaneously pious and market-driven, his apotheosis of the painter is two things at once. Elegantly packaged, it is a promotional tool for sustaining his father's cult status and attendant asset value. Equally, it is a devotional tract for the faithful who confuse aesthetic sensation with religious sensibility. The text makes instructive reading, largely as inoculation against the fallacy in which it Read more
Way of Illustration
The art of writing about art.
Oct 19, 2015
The British painter Howard Hodgkin came to the Frick Collection some years ago to lecture. After pained attempts to deliver a prepared talk, he abandoned his notes for a monologue. Zig-zagging through art in general, his own work, and the historical canon, he came to that curious contemporary genre: art writing . Hodgkin dismissed legions of contemporary art writers with one sentence: “Too many people think they can write without ever having had to read.” It was a nimble curtsy to his longtime f Read more
Postmodern Cézanne
This is what happens when politics distorts art.
Dec 17, 2012
Five months before he died, Paul Cézanne attended the unveiling of a bust of Émile Zola, his old soulmate, at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix. Numa Coste, friend to both, addressed the gathering. He reminded the attendees of Zola’s autumnal insistence that “one thinks one has revolutionized the world, and then one finds out, at the end of the road, that one has not revolutionized anything at all.” The elderly painter cried at the words. John Rewald, preeminent authority on late-19th-century Fren Read more
Modern Martyr
The brief, bohemian transit of Amedeo Modigliani.
Apr 11, 2011
Modigliani A Life by Meryle Secrest Knopf, 416 pp., $35 I want a short life but a full one. Amedeo Modigliani got his wish. In 1920, at age 35, he died, toothless, of tubercular meningitis in a Parisian pauper’s hospital. It was a sordid end to a confident stride into the trenches of la vie maudite . The romance of heroic nonconformity, vital to the cult of bohemia, absorbed the squalor and blessed it. Léopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s primary dealer, declared him “made for the stars.” Clement Gre Read more
Sitting Pretty
What’s so good about Lucian Freud?
Oct 04, 2010
Man with a Blue Scarf On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford Thames & Hudson, 256 pp., $40 Art critics have been sitting for their portraits since Diderot, grandaddy of modern criticism, modeled for Fragonard. Under 18th-century Prussian rigor, aesthetics hardened into a discipline. Critics arose as arbiters and exegetes. The benefits of painting them rose, too. Johann Winckelmann, pioneer of art historical methodology, posed for Anton Mengs; Immanuel Kant, for lesser lights Read more
Art of the Faithful
Spain’s Counter-Reformation as seen by its artists.
Apr 26, 2010
The Sacred Made Real Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 National Gallery of Art Through May 31 The medieval spirit, steeped in sacred purpose, penetrated Spain’s Golden Age in Counter-Reformation guise. Through the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish imagination bore the militant stamp of a mission to gird the Roman Catholic Church—its catholicity shaken—against the cudgeling of Protestant reformers. Evangelism was particularly keen in Spain, fortified by the Council of Trent and leavened by Read more
