Artwork Spotlight: Andy Warhol's "Ladies and Gentlemen"
August 12, 2019 By Larry Luowei Zhang This portrait depicts the remarkable transgender and AIDS activist Marsha P. Johnson. Her resistance and outspoken advocacy during the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, which began on the night of June 28, 1969, helped spark the LGBTQ civil rights movement in America. This portrayal of Johnson by […]
Special Museum Edge Review on Fritz Ascher
State of the Arts NYC, March 31, 2019
Fritz Ascher: Expressionist is the first American solo retrospective to showcase this artist's bold, colorful oeuvre, which features early academic studies and figural compositions as well as late mystical landscapes devoid of human presence. We hear our contributor Irene Javors who reviews this exhibition for Museum Edge.
Fritz Ascher in New York: sustained by art through the darkness
Financial Times, January 23, 2019
You have probably never heard of Fritz Ascher, a passionate and peculiar painter who, nearly 40 years after his death, is finally getting a smidgen of renown at New York's Grey Art Gallery. Ascher belonged to a generation of German artists the Nazis hounded into hiding — or worse — leaving a chapter in the history of art truncated and brimming with might-have-beens.
Exhibition Review: Grey Art Gallery – NeoRealismo
Musée Magazine, October 5, 2018
New York University's latest photography exhibit showcased at Grey Art Gallery, titled NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960, features a collection of 174 images from over 60 Italian photographers. As the title references, the photographs are from Italy before, during, and after World War II. The concept of neorealism was a cinematic and literary movement that showed the disastrous postwar conditions, helping inspire this collection.
Art Against Propaganda
NYU Arts Digest, Fall 2018
In 1932, to commemorate the first decade of Fascist rule in Italy, Benito Mussolini inaugurated the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome. The exhibition, which consisted of 23 rooms filled with myriad forms of art, historical documentation, and artifacts, stayed on display for two years. It proved a massive success, drawing more than 2.8 million visitors.
How Fascism Complicates the Beauty of Italian Postwar Photography
Hyperallergic, December 6, 2018
Italian neorealism is rooted in the bloodied soil of Fascism. When postwar life arrived for the artists, filmmakers, and photographers who had trudged through the Benito Mussolini years as propagandists, their work had to evolve from goading the nationalistic fervor that drove Italy toward war. Shaped by an era of denouement, Italian neorealism diffused the belligerence of warmongering into a romanticization of the country's laborers and emerging middle class. Accordingly, the genre became a dynamic negotiation between the realities of postwar recovery and the impulse to render la belleza della vita, the beauty of life, no matter the material conditions of this recovery.
David O'Neill reviews NeoRealismo
ArtForum, December 2018
The word realism conjures the everyday, the unfussy, the small. But what's real when the world has gone mad? It's a question that gripped Italian photographers, directors, journalists, and writers around World War II and is surely worth asking again. This exhibition heralds artists who captured quotidian life in an era of daily shocks.
10 Under-the-Radar Art Shows to See Now
The New York Times, November 22, 2018
"NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932–1960" reviewed in The New York Times by Jillian Steinhauer.
A Lens on the Real Italy
Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2018
Enrica Viganò, an independent curator, spent nine years searching through the archives of individual photographers to assemble the 174 prints in "NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960." There are no institutions in Italy that, like the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., hold the archives of important photographers, so Ms. Viganò sought out her subjects one by one. In fact, the point of the exhibition is to establish photography as a significant art form in a country where it has never ranked with painting, literature, music or, more recently, film.
The not-so-good life: how postwar Italy rediscovered itself
Financial Times, October 5, 2018
The second world war left Italy in a shambles that proved fruitful for art. A republic was born amid the rubble and, after decades of fascist mythmaking, a new artistic frankness thrived. Yet one form of stylistic narrowness gave way to another — novelists, film-makers and photo graphers subscribed to the tenets of neorealism and united around a common project: to portray their devastated country unsparingly, with all its squalor, toughness and hope.
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