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Articles by Michael Lobel
Jacob Lawrence and the Unfinished History of American Inequality
IT’S DIFFICULT for me to think of a twentieth-century American artist whose overall project better meets our present moment than Jacob Lawrence. His best-known body of work—the “Migration” series of 1940–41—gives distinctive visual form to masses of people uprooting their lives to move elsewhere, confronting both the causes and the repercussions of such demographic phenomena.
Star Man: Vincent van Gogh’s Illuminated Nights
The author explores Van Gogh’s fascination with different kinds of illumination, from stars to newly invented gaslight. Michael Lobel Jul 17, 2024 There are two works in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection that seem to perfectly distill the significance of light and illumination to Vincent van Gogh’s art. Each is—or stands in for—one of the artist’s most iconic works. The first is a print, a lithograph, he made in 1885, relating to one of his earliest major painterly efforts, The Potato Eaters.
From a Fresh Look at Van Gogh To an Artist’s Ode to The Bodega, Here Are 6 Books On Our Reading List In 2024
In the world of art book publishing, the first few months of the new year see a host of historical and scholarly works. Here, we look at several such volumes, from a deep-dive into the cerebral art collection of the late former MoMA curator and director William Rubin to a revisioning of Vincent van Gogh to a stimulating exploration of art as protest in Eastern and Western Europe. Welcome to the art literati.
The unnerving resonance of Diego Rivera’s Vaccination
“Two Perfect Specimens of Heathy Babies,” Detroit Free Press, September 11, 1932. OVER THE COURSE of the past couple of years, I’ve kept coming back to the image of Diego Rivera’s Vaccination. I can’t get it out of my head. The primary reason should be fairly obvious: This is arguably the most iconic and widely recognized artistic treatment of a subject that many of us have been reading, talking, and thinking about incessantly during the pandemic. But there’s more to it than that.
Michael Lobel on Romare Bearden in the 1930s
Case Study Michael Lobel on Romare Bearden in the 1930s SO AS NOT TO BURY THE LEDE, as the old journalistic saying goes, I’ll make things perfectly clear right from the outset: It’s very likely that this 1936 black-and-white photo of a protest in Brooklyn captures two hitherto unknown paintings by Romare Bearden, one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated African American artists. If that’s the case, these would be among the earliest, if not the earliest, painted works by Bearden on record.
Michael Lobel on art and the United States Postal Service
Jasper Johns, Flag Study, 1959, watercolor and graphite on found paper envelope, 4 1/8 × 9 1/2". © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. IN LATE 1993, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, opened the one-person exhibition “To Disembark,” by Glenn Ligon.
Michael Lobel on Confederate memorials and the history of “degenerate art"
View of Frederick Wellington Ruckstull’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Baltimore covered in red paint, August 14, 2017. Photo: Jerry Jackson/Getty. SOME HAVE BEEN INCLINED to view the recent removal of Civil War monuments as a turn away from the past.
Michael Lobel on art and the 1918 flu pandemic
Slant Michael Lobel on art and the 1918 flu pandemic April 21, 2020 OVER THE COURSE OF SEVERAL RECENT MONTHS, a fiery debate raged in the pages of UK art publications The Burlington Magazine and The Art Newspaper, and inevitably migrated online as well. It revolved around a simple question: Who was the true author of the radical 1917 work Fountain, the porcelain urinal submitted to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York under the pseudonym R. Mutt?
LOST AND FOUND: SUSAN WEIL AND ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’S BLUEPRINTS
WRITING IN THESE PAGES IN 1972, the critic Leo Steinberg famously heralded the radical rupture instigated by ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’s art. Rauschenberg’s “picture planes,” dense accumulations of things and images, dispensed with the transcendent weightlessness of modernist painting and instead evoked the quotidian material of studio floors and detritus, streams of data and imprinted information. As art historian Branden W.
Black to Front: Robert Colescott
Robert Colescott’s Interior I, 1991, is a spot-on pastiche of one of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Interiors” paintings: Here are the sterile modern furnishings, the stark outlines, the repeating dot patterns. Yet someone has shuffled in to disturb the otherwise pristine scene—a dark-skinned figure sits on the white couch, his stockinged foot plunked unceremoniously on the gleaming coffee table. Considering the man’s relaxed posture and garb, could that open can he grasps be anything but a beer?
Michael Lobel on Gordon Parks and Ella Watson
EVEN NOW, decades later, it retains the power to mesmerize. Spare and emblematic, the image has the concision of a single-verse hymn: a woman, standing at center, mop and broom on either side of her; a few pieces of office equipment appearing at left and right; an American flag hanging in the background. Yet there is just enough ambiguity to elicit closer attention.
Van Gogh and the End of Nature
Description Praise A groundbreaking reassessment that foregrounds Van Gogh’s profound engagement with the industrial age while making his work newly relevant for our world today Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape.
Remembering Linda Nochlin
LINDA NOCHLIN, who died on October 29, was an intellectual of the highest order. As a scholar and teacher, Nochlin demonstrated how critical attention to art could illuminate social life. More than expanding the canon of art history to include women artists and artists of color—though she was certainly instrumental in that regard—Nochlin revealed the ideological underpinnings of any process of canonization.
(PDF) Warhol's Closet | Michael Lobel - Academia.edu
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Sturtevant at 100: It Can Take a Long Time to Understand What Is Seen
How do you mark the centenary of a trailblazing artist whose work avoids encapsulation? During the early 2000s, as the artist Sturtevant approached the last decade of her life, she produced a work titled The Dark Threat of Absence (2002), a video installation in which she revisits Paul McCarthy’s video Painter (1995), an abject exploration of Abstract Expressionism and painterly prowess.
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