Op art got a bad name almost as soon as it got a name. The year was 1964 and Time magazine—or Donald Judd (sources vary)—coined the term to refer to a brand of hard-edged abstract painting that often flirted with optical illusion. At its slickest, op art’s trippy, eye-tickling effects were psychedelic-adjacent, easily transferable to dorm-room posters and throw-pillow fabrics—abstraction’s equivalent to a Happy Meal. But some practitioners probed deeper, finding sublimity in the genre’s rhythmic, sometimes warped geometries, and none more so than Bridget Riley, the 88-year-old English painter who is the subject of a retrospective opening this week at the Hayward Gallery, in London’s Southbank Centre. READ ON
Bridget Riley’s study for Turn. A retrospective of the artist’s work opens on October 23 at London’s Hayward Gallery.
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In one of Sofonisba Anguissola’s multiple self-portraits, the Renaissance painter stands against a striking green background, meeting the viewer’s gaze with wide, clear eyes and an upturned mouth that seems both pensive and amused. As if to prove her bona fides, she brandishes a small book that reads Sophonisba Angusola virgo seipsam fecit 1554 (“The virgin Sofonisba Anguissola made this herself in 1554”). The artist has written her own art history. READ ON
Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait. “A Tale of Two Women Painters,” celebrating the art of the early women artists Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, opens at the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, on October 22.
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No space-age wizard did more to fulfill Marshall McLuhan’s vision of the global media-scape than the Korean-American artist and inventor Nam June Paik, born in 1932. Like McLuhan, whose fussy professorial manner gave his gnomic pronouncements and paradoxes a Mad Hatter air (“Diaper spelled backwards is ‘repaid,’ think about it”), Paik was a master of the earnest put-on—a playful provocateur. READ ON
Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456. A new exhibition of the artist’s work is on view at London’s Tate Modern through February 9.
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“I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy,” Joni Mitchell said in 2000, nearly 30 years after her manager, Elliot Roberts, and her agent, David Geffen, compiled a collection of her drawings and handwritten lyrics to give to friends at Christmas. “In the early 1970s I used to carry a sketchbook around with me everywhere I went,” she writes in the introduction to Morning Glory on the Vine, the 1971 Christmas present that Mitchell has finally decided to publish, with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, on the occasion of her 75th-birthday year. READ ON
Neil Young by Joni Mitchell, circa 1971.
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When Thomas Pastuszak, the wine director of the NoMad Hotel, goes to Paris, he seeks out friend and fellow sommelier Marco Pelletier…
Ride
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Marc Leyer
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