A white hand, black with soot, clamps open and shut. It lets pieces of lead fall through its gnawing fingers. Sometimes it catches the pieces, sometimes not. It always allows the lead to leave below the frame. The body is framed as a fragment, the hand floats. It would seem there is no end result to all this hand-grasping: as soon as a lead is...

Susan Laxton's book Surrealism at Play passionately traces how a particular art movement envisioned and articulated its own transformative potential. As Laxton illustrates, the Surrealists agitated for exploding art into life, which meant engaging with their day-to-day reality, and taking a critical stance toward it. A professor of art history at...

WATER MILL, New York — In Provincetown Window (1963–64), Helen Frankenthaler abstracted a familiar object. In doing so, she established a delicate balance of color and space. Orbs of blue, green, orange, and yellow acrylic radiate within a royal blue windowpane. Patches of unpainted canvas allow the saturations to shine more brightly.

The trouble with [AR]T—an augmented reality initiative produced by Apple in collaboration with the New Museum—began when I tried to get tickets. Because it was framed as a free public art experience, I thought that the [AR]T Walk would be easily accessible, like a drop-in guided tour at a museum. But Apple's home page offered no...

The art market seems to defy most conventional laws of economics, but has historically obeyed the law of supply and demand, prizing the rare above what is easily come by, and the unique above all. Increasingly, however, even this principle is looking wobbly, as art that comes in multiples gains in appeal and value.

Vernon, California, is a small city near Los Angeles with a population of a hundred and twelve. Every day, fifty thousand people commute to work there, in its eighteen hundred factories, warehouses, and small businesses. Light fixtures, Farmer John hot dogs, industrial chemicals, Tapatío hot sauce, and stuffed toys are made in Vernon. One of the...

Laura Weir Clarke and Fred Clarke moved from their native Texas to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, intoxicated by West Coast culture and in search of fine art. They wandered the city, knocking on studio doors of artists they respected seeking insight into the creative process, befriending artists Chris Burden and Larry Bell, gallery owner Margo...

Looking at the huge, colour-saturated prints by Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) currently on display at Princeton University Art Museum will lift your spirits, and may make you dance right there – or return home to try your hand at printmaking. For Frankenthaler turned upside down the long-held, demanding rules for etching, lithography and other...

L.A. master Ed Ruscha boasts Hollywood collectors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Owen Wilson and Jay-Z, but few can lay claim to as many of his works as architect Fred Clarke, partner of the late Cesar Pelli.

Who is Slim Stealingworth? He wrote an 80-page essay for a Tom Wesselmann monograph in 1980. He also penned various catalogue essays for Wesselmann until 2002, two years before the American pop artist's death. 'Many of these earliest works began with finding a piece of wood that seemed special,' Stealingworth notes about Wesselmann's process.

LONDON — Following Baghdad's fall to US troops in 2003, more than 15,000 artifacts were looted from the National Museum of Iraq by thieves. The presence of ISIS went on to facilitate further destruction of ancient culture in the country, yet looting and pillaging in Iraq is nothing new. Western archaeologists have been laying their claim over...

RHINEBECK, NY — Once there were formalists: critics and artists who looked for the meaning of art in the forms of art. On the American scene, the word summons up Clement Greenberg and the Greenbergians, critics who liked to talk about the integrity of the picture plane and 'purely optical space.' They were preceded by Roger Fry and Clive...

For Katharina Grosse's first solo exhibition in China, Mumbling Mud, the internationally acclaimed German artist aimed her spray gun at Shanghai's Chi K11 Art Museum, firing liters of paint across swatches of fabrics, piles of soil and spreads of furniture.

Five winners of the Turner prize are demanding an end to BP's sponsorship of the National Portrait Gallery, stepping up the campaign against big oil's involvement in the arts.Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing and Mark Wallinger are among a group of almost 80 leading artists, including winners of the BP portrait award,...

The first museum show in Europe hosted by Fondation Beyeler will present a selection of Stingel's major and world renowned historical works alongside brand new works created specifically for the exhibition. This career-spanning selection offers a comprehensive gestalt of Stingel's work and heightens his repute as he spans the walls alongside...

The exhibition 'Baselitz – Academy' at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice gathers work that goes right back to the beginning of Georg Baselitz's career, when he was still a student in West Berlin in the years around 1960, but is hardly a retrospective. There are long gaps (barely anything from the '80s or '90s, for example), and the focus is on...

For his last big show in Europe in 2013, Rudolf Stingel covered the floors and walls of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice with an Ottoman-style synthetic carpet. Now he’s taking over the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, with an exhibition of work from the last three decades.Mr. Stingel, who is based in New York, has devoted his career to...

The authority of Francis Bacon’s art is papal. I am not referring to the paintings inspired by Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X that made him famous. It’s just that walking into Gagosian’s immaculate selection of his paintings feels like exploring the art treasures of St Peter’s and the Vatican, so sublime is this display. If these pictures...

Art Basel 2019 opens to the public on Thursday, June 13, with two preview days, on June 11 and 12. Some 290 galleries from 34 countries will show work at the Swiss fair, which runs through June 16.

Now on view at the Fondation Beyeler is an exhibition of Rudolf Stingel’s work, curated by Udo Kittelmann. This is the first major presentation of the artist’s works in Europe since his celebrated show at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2013, and his first exhibition in Switzerland since the early show at Kunsthalle Zürich in 1995. Whitewaller spoke...

Last year, Gagosian introduced an innovative virtual online viewing room during Art Basel. This year, the gallery is creating another sales platform during the Swiss fair, this time taking a bricks and mortar approach with an off-site pop-up exhibition titled Continuing Abstraction (10—16 June).

In March, the National Gallery of Australia will unveil its most recent significant international purchase, Francesco (2017), a sculptural portrait by Urs Fischer of respected Italian art curator Francesco Bonami standing atop a refrigerator, looking intently at an iPhone in his hand. The sculpture is designed to be burnt: wicks are inserted at...

SAN FRANCISCO — The large, brightly colored canvases sparkled beside the white walls of the Gagosian Gallery downtown. Larry Gagosian, the art world's megadealer, stood toward the back of the room in blue jeans and loafers while the star of the evening, Richard Prince, the artist perhaps best known for tweaking iconic images and pushing the...

On est fasciné par ses toiles abstraites qui fleurissent dans les plus grands musées et dans les foires. On foule ses tapis-peintures engloutissant les espaces des galeries ou du Palazzo Grassi. On touche et on laisse son empreinte sur ses larges panneaux comme ceux qu’il avait installés dans le Pavillon italien de la Biennale de Venise. Mais...