The cover photograph for the informative catalogue that accompanies this dazzling show was taken by Hans Namuth and catches Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler at their wedding lunch on April 6, 1958. Her look is all love; Motherwell, averting his gaze from Namuth, has a vacant, slightly ironic expression. Was it because he'd already been...

Pierre Soulages is a century old. In anticipation of his retrospective to be held at the Salon Carré at the Louvre later this year, the current exhibition at Lévy Gorvy, Pierre Soulages: A Century, presents a generously full survey. On the first floor, we see the paintings with wide black horizontals or verticals, which made his name in France...

The line between art and jewellery has become increasingly blurred since the 20th century, when modernist artists like Meret Oppenheim, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Man Ray began exploring the possibilities of miniature metalwork. These exciting experiments with form challenged the art world's status quo, producing uniquely arresting jewels with...

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...

David Hammons has long been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the so-called art world. While his professed admiration for Marcel Duchamp appears to have brought him a clear sense of the symbolic and transformational power that contexts confer to objects, it has offered an even sharper awareness of how the mythographic, star-making mechanics of the...

Was Lucio Fontana, at heart, just an easily distracted ceramicist? So one might conclude from the current exhibition at the Met. The show reveals a chameleon figure, highly responsive to the prevailing winds of art and politics. He worked across many artistic disciplines, in contexts that should have been antithetical to one another, leaving an...

At 82, the artist Frank Stella has done it all and isn't terribly concerned what anyone thinks. He is matter-of-fact and unguarded, secure on his perch in the pantheon after two solo retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. He can — and did — wear white house-slippers to an interview and photo shoot. Deal with it. Mr. Stella...

The stark white room is punctuated by abstract black forms — jagged, organic, dramatic and playful — that sprout up from the floor or dangle languidly from the ceiling. Glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, they shift ever so slightly as you walk down the long gallery space, a former bank building. Around each corner, a new surprise....

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.

On my way to Günther Uecker's (b. 1930) studio in Düsseldorf, I manage to lose my way, and when I ask for directions a helpful passerby points past a twisting trio of Frank Gehry buildings and says, 'Take a right at Uecker Platz.' Günther Uecker may have the honour of having a whole square christened after him, but he's not a grand figure. When I...

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...

Redwood City, California A benevolent pirate ship is about to settle in Redwood City, thanks to the curator Lance Fung. Instead of looters, the artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s large-scale boat installation (with the word 'IMAGINE' nearby) will bring a new emphasis on public art to the area. Fung — who is best known for curating a show of...

The artist Frank Stella (born 1936) and the master printer Ken Tyler (born 1931) have been making prints together since 1967, but after almost 40 years, there is no such thing as a 'typical' Stella print. There is an enormous diversity and experimental variety. Early in the collaborative process, Stella's prints appeared as a small tributary...

Looking at a mobile by Alexander Calder is akin to gazing at wavering foliage on a calm summer afternoon. What looks deceptively simple slowly comes alive with an inexhaustible sense of wonder. It's reported that Albert Einstein once stood enraptured at an exhibition in front of Calder's mechanized moving sculpture, A Universe (1934), for a full...

In 2003, at the age of 26, Ryan McGinley had his first major solo show in New York—at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today, after more than a decade of the art world strategizing and promoting young artists as instant masters worthy of career-size retrospectives with what is often still embryonic material, that fact may not ring as...

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...

It has come to be seen as one of the landmark events in the history of performance art. The evening was conducted by French artist Yves Klein, who wore a black dinner jacket and white bow tie for the occasion, and who gave us a radically different type of nude in art. But there has been criticism of the way Klein used young women - dubbed...

Frieze may be over for another year, but as the tents are dismantled in London’s Regent’s Park, so the art market circus is preparing to pitch camp in Paris. This week sees the 43rd edition of FIAC, the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain or International Contemporary Art Fair, as well as the second edition of Asia Now...

In 1959, New York's Museum of Modern Art sent an exhibition to eight European cities—concluding at London's Tate gallery—with the calmly self-assured title of The New American Painting. It featured 17 artists, most of whom were associated with Abstract Expressionism, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz...

From Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York to an open-air museum in Japan, the works of American sculptor Alexander Calder have been displayed in a number of remarkable locations across the globe. Now, the Swiss Alps can be added to that list, as Hauser & Wirth brings together six monumental sculptures from the 1960s and 70s...

Anyone who saw early presentations of Joel Shapiro's sculpture in New York will remember a small untitled floor piece from 1973: a foot-long wood mannikin pulled limb from limb, its wire spring ligaments exposed. The bad boy gesture of this anomalous piece—its dismissal of sculpture's future as a representational art, its...

The works of Alexander Calder and Fischli/Weiss, from the early and late-twentieth century, respectively, are now in dialogue, thanks to a recent Theodora Vischer project, senior curator at the Fondation Beyeler. In the entrance rooms, two figures (the size of children) lay on the floor. One in the costume of a black and white panda, the other, of...

A must every year during Art Basel is a visit to the Fondation Beyeler, the fantastic collection and exhibition space designed by Renzo Piano. On view during the fair this time around (and through September 4, 2016) is the show Calder & Fischli/Weiss. A seemingly curious pairing, the show offers a unique perspective on Calder’s art when...

Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work. Now they’re expected to provide money, too. In today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries for larger...