Want to smoke in your house but not at the cost of your family’s health? Making your home smoking friendly can be done, but that doesn’t mean you can just throw open the windows and puff away. A much more serious, scientific approach is required.
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Photo By Gail
The phrase immortalized on this canvases, Wen Out For Cigrets (1985), refers to an American cultural trope in which a father leaves the house to buy cigarettes and never returns, abandoning his family.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Ed Ruscha, Wen Out For Cigrets
Photo By Gail
Stuart Davis typically painted local modern subjects in rhythmic compositions with bold colors. Among his sources of inspiration were “skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations; chain store fronts and taxi cabs“ and jazz music. Long before postwar artists mined the world of trademark brands, Davis incorporated imagery from logos, commercial signage, and packaging into his paintings, such as the branded bag of tobacco in Lucky Strike (1921). Championed by the visionary dealer Edith Halpert at her downtown Gallery, Davis’s work was met with both enthusiasm and confusion despite being engaged with the stuff and forms of modern life in New York in the 1920s.
Photographed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Photo By Gail
The enormous sandwich and pack of cigarettes in Still Life Number 36 (1964) reflect Tom Wesselmann’s nonhierarchical approach to subject matter and technique. He believed that anything could be art, including the ordinary consumer items that fill our pockets and kitchen cabinets. In 1962, Wesselmann began a series of large-scale still lifes that incorporated fragments of discarded commercial billboards, which he initially scavenged from trash cans but later procured in new, pristine condition directly from advertising agencies. The larger-than-life proportions of the objects in Still Life Number 36 at first seem to celebrate the surfeit of commercial goods in America’s postwar consumer culture. Yet the layers of collage and painted areas bring together incongruent depictions of reality, creating tensions in the composition that Wesselmann described as “reverberation.
Photographed in The Whitney Museum in NYC.
All Photos by Gail
Dorian Grey Gallery in the East Village hosted an informal brunch today to promote its current exhibit, Indulgences, works on paper and recent paintings by New York artist Walter Robinson. As you might infer from the show’s title, Indulgences includes paintings of sweets and fast food favorites, pharmaceuticals and alcohol. The show also includes a selection of celebrity portraits, nudes and romance novel covers, but I didn’t feel compelled to shoot pictures of any of that stuff, so, you know, just go to the gallery and check it out.
Continue reading Dorian Grey Gallery Presents Walter Robinson, Indulgences