Awesome-looking show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Pennsylvania

from John Porcellino’s post on comic book back covers

adamnorwood:

The New York Times has up a nice review of the new Charles Addams exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

Fear, organized.

bobulate:

Brian Rea, organizer of worry, “I discovered like most people I had a lot of fears — after a few months, I began to catalog them: physical fears, natural fears, political fears, random, emotional.” After 11 years in New York, he made lists of his own and those of the people around him to fill up a 7-meter-by-3.5-meter wall, an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona called Murals.

See also: Stephen Kroninger on Grosz’s NYC years.

The Dada caricaturist, draughtsman and painter George Grosz (1893-1959) spent more than half of his creative career—27 years—living and working in the United States. The effects of this emigration upon his art were once widely deemed to be wholly negative, since it seemingly marked a rejection of aggressively political satire: “I had simply lost all interest in human weaknesses and individual foibles,” wrote Grosz in his autobiography, “and the further I drew away from them, the closer I felt to nature.” Grosz was particularly passionate about the art of watercolor—so much so that shortly before his death in 1959 he began to write a book on watercolor technique—and his innovations in this area, alongside his caricatures of New York life and his more apocalyptic war paintings, have at last been retreived from the respective shadows of Grosz’s own earlier work and of American Abstract Expressionism, which reigned supreme during Grosz’s American years.

Great documentary. A beautiful portrait of a couple who decided what was important to them, and made it work with what they had. From the NYTimes review:

Once upon a time, a postal clerk with an enthusiasm for art history married an open-minded librarian. From the outside, little distinguished Herb and Dorothy Vogel from any other middle-class couple in midcentury New York. But by the early 1960s, if you were to squeeze inside their modest Manhattan apartment, dodging the cats and turtle tanks, you would bump into the most astonishing company: the work of Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Richard Tuttle, Robert Mangold, Lynda Benglis and dozens of other artists who would come to represent the crème de la crème of Minimalist and Conceptual art.

The story of how this collection — a large portion of which now resides at the National Gallery of Art in Washington — came to be is the subject of Megumi Sasaki’s modest, touching documentary, “Herb & Dorothy.”