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...

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...

'Sculpture,' wrote David Smith in 1951, 'is as free as the mind; as complex as life'. That freedom and complexity is on full display in this exhilarating show of more than 40 pieces by the artist generally regarded as the dominant sculptor of Abstract Expressionism. Ranging across three decades, it traces Smith's development, from early wooden...

MAHÓN, Menorca — I usually don't go around ranking artists but I was enormously impressed by the Albert Oehlen retrospective in Venice this past January. I thought, who do we have as good as this guy? Seeing Stanley Whitney's most recent work this summer gave me my answer. While not departing from his known program, his newest seems to...

It was 50 years ago, but Penelope Seidler still recalls how she got involved in Wrapped Coast, the first Kaldor Public Art Project. 'I can remember John coming back from a trip and he said "Christo wants to wrap up a coast, that's what he wants to do. Do you know anywhere where he could do it?"' Seidler pauses, 'I was sort of bemused. I...

He’s a household name yet ‘most people do not know anything about Yves Klein’, says Daniel Moquay, director of the late French artist’s estate, and husband of Klein’s widow, Rotraut. Moquay has helped to coordinate an exhibition on Klein – who would have been 90 this year – taking place in the spectacular settings of Blenheim Palace.

The Art Newspaper: The Serpentine Mastaba is your first major sculpture in the UK. What is so special about this form?Christo: Mastaba is an old word coming from the first urban civilisation 7,000 years ago, when people moved from the countryside to mud houses in Mesopotamia, which today is Iraq. When for the first time archaeologists discovered...

Christo has been working with barrels since the start of his career, and many of his early works using them will appear in the Serpentine Gallery exhibition accompanying The Mastaba: 'retracing all that story,' as Christo puts it. In 1958, he was wrapping and stacking them and eventually he started filling rooms in galleries. The most famous of...

Galerie Gmurzynska is proudly presenting for the first time in Zurich in both gallery spaces an extensive selection of sculpture, drawings, photographs and archival material, with 27 works in total, celebrating and documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s extraordinary career, stretching from their first seminal projects realized after relocating to...

In the late 1950s, five artists, all gay, living within a few blocks of one another in New York, redirected the course of American painting. They abandoned gestural expressionism and laid the groundwork for the pop and minimalist idioms of the following decade. Four of them have received plenty of credit for doing so: Ellsworth Kelly, Robert...

Since arriving in New York City in 1964, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always compared their work to that of urban planners. The very fact that their larger-than-life projects are subject to approval by local authorities makes them resemble public construction projects more than works of art. This is what the new monograph Christo and...

In a 2000 interview with the Japanese photographer Mako Wakasa for the Journal of Contemporary Art, the artist Takashi Murakami presented the following rules for survival and success in the contemporary art market (best exemplified, he said, by Damien Hirst and the continued relevance of Picasso and Warhol): "First of all, distinctively...

Today, Expo Chicago returns to its home on the Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan. This is the sixth edition of the city's annual art fair and exhibition platform, which is the biggest of its kind in the Midwest.The center of the fair lies in the convention center, where 135 galleries, non-profit organizations, and arts publications from 25...

When the artist David Smith died in an auto accident in 1965, he left behind nearly 100 of his large sculptures in the grass outside his studio in Bolton Landing, N.Y., in the Adirondacks. He coated most of those pieces in auto enamel, not only to protect their steel but to amplify, with bright colors and sometimes visible brush strokes, the works'...

In 1994, Donald Judd was preparing for The Moscow Installation, an exhibition with Kazimir Malevich that would be the first to align the work of the two titans of 20th-century art. 'I would love it but what would Malevich say?' Judd had said when Galerie Gmurzynska had proposed the idea. Sadly, Judd passed away before the exhibition opened and now...

As anniversaries go, few are more potent than the one marked by this exhibition. 80 years ago, on the afternoon of Monday 26 April 1937, aeroplanes of the German Condor Legion, acting in support of Franco's Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, bombed and virtually obliterated the undefended Basque town of Gernika: one of the first times...

Twenty years after the handover of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China, Hong Kong stands at a crossroads. The generation to come of age in the intervening decades has become restless, frustrated by the rejection of demands for universal suffrage (the election for the next Chief Executive takes places tomorrow, March 26, but only 1194...

Now in its fifth edition, Art Basel Hong Kong has become a firm annual fixture on the city’s cultural – and art collector’s – map. With almost 80,000 visitors and surprisingly robust sales reported on opening night, this edition featured a stronger selection of works than previous years, and noticeably less bling on show by 242 galleries from 34...

Two or three muted, but skillfully executed, pieces of portraiture slowly lead the viewer to paintings with the merest hint of figures, before dissolving entirely into realms of line, colour, light and rhythm. This is just the first room of the major Abstract Expressionism show at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, fresh from a groundbreaking run at...

Assouline launched a volume honoring the great Colombian painter Fernando Botero in late October, written by editor, critic and curator Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz Fisac. In it, the distinctive story and defiantly tenacious oeuvre of the figurative master is revered through previously unpublished works curated in collaboration with the artist...

Even the small talk was more solemn at this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. On opening day of what is America’s largest fair of contemporary art and Champagne-steeped hedonism, the air kisses were shadowed by the challenges the presidency of Donald J. Trump might pose to an art world that likes to imagine itself as a force for...

In 1918, W. Magat and N. Rosenfeld sketched out a design plan with pops of color to decorate the Theater-Square in Moscow to commemorate the first anniversary of the Russian Revolution. 'You can see Bolshoi Ballet, and Red Square, and all the monuments of Moscow being decorated for one of those great ceremonial processions, avant-garde...

Earlier this month in London a crowd of shivering, well-dressed art lovers lined up outside of Almine Rech Gallery in Mayfair. It was the night before Frieze London, and many of the city’s galleries had taken advantage of the flood of international art buyers to put on marquee exhibitions. Almine Rech Gallery, owned by Almine Ruiz-Picasso...