Nation Topics - Fine Art | The Nation

Reviews an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, featuring Fra Angelico, through January 29, 2006 in New York City.

Reviews the exhibit "Max Ernst: A Retrospective," including such pieces as "The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Artist," on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through July 10, 2005.

Profiles artist Rick Meyerowitz who created a political cartoon found in the April 25, 2005, issue of "The Nation."

Presents a discussion about the separation wall that the Israelis built through and around Jerusalem to protect them from Palestinian terrorism. Report that artist Yoav Weiss is selling off pieces of the wall over the Internet; Reference to the death of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat; Discussion of the peace process between Palestine and Israel; Reference to a speech made by author David Grossman at the Jerusalem International Book Fair; Discussion of suicide bombings; Election of Mahmoud Abbas for president in Palestine in January 2005.

The article offers information about artist Anita Kunz. Canadian artist Anita Kunz (www.anitakunz.com), who drew this week's "Comix Nation," has appeared in magazines worldwide.

Reviews the exhibition "The Gates," an installation of 7,500 gates with saffron banners in New York City's Central Park designed by the environmental artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude.

Focuses on the history, design, and reconstruction of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Description of the MoMA lobby and various exhibits; Mention of designer Yoshio Taniguchi and the Art Deco style of the original building; View that the atrium is the spiritual core of MoMA; The artistic core of the new MoMA being the galleries on the fourth and fifth floors, which contain "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and other paintings; The identity of MoMA under Alfred Barr and William Rubin; Purpose of the sixth floor.

The article discusses the history surrounding the work of artist Romare Bearden. Crossing from the first to the second room of the generous retrospective of Romare Bearden's art, on view through January 9, 2005, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is not simply to move from one phase to another in Bearden's development; it is to leave one art historical period for another. Bearden was successful in both periods--in the 1940s of the first room, he showed with Samuel Kootz, whose gallery was dedicated to advanced art of the time; and in the 1960s of the second room, he was one of the stars of the important gallery Cordier and Ekstrom. But his work of the two periods was deeply different. Bearden abruptly became Bearden around 1964--a miraculous year for him as an artist, when he broke through into a mode of representation distinctively his own and entered the calm waters of a marvelously personal style that was never again challenged, from without or within. Bearden was liberated by Pop to find his own language, and the urgency of black liberation gave him his subject. He became a leading artist of the black experience. The train is a recurring symbol in Bearden's art, perhaps because it was a central symbol of the black migration, carrying people between North and South, city and country, as in August Wilson's great play The Piano Lesson, whose title is drawn from one of Bearden's paintings.

Reviews an art exhibit at the New York Jewish Museum in 2004 by artist Amedeo Modigliani.

Reviews an exhibition of the work of artist Dieter Roth, at the MoMA-Queens and PS1 in New York through June 7, 2004.