Willem de Kooning

Latest Articles

Richard Brown Lethem finds new playing fields

Content with the unknown
"One thing that's different about this show," Richard Brown Lethem tells me as we stand in the gallery where his paintings currently hang, "is that I'd never done a series before now. I've always tried to fit all the subject matter into one painting."
By NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | August 17, 2011

Review: Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, And Conversations

Fast talk: A great artist bends your ear
If you are interested in the great painter Philip Guston (1913–1980), you will want this book. If you are interested in American painting from 1945 on, and into the future, you will want this book. If you enjoy a great talker in top form, you will want this book.
By WILLIAM CORBETT | January 07, 2011

Alternative universe

Boston Expressionism in context
In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.
By GREG COOK | December 16, 2009

Wizards and masterpieces

Harry Potter at the Museum of Science, and another look at the Rose
At “Harry Potter: The Exhibition” at the Museum of Science, when a robed attendant places the sorting hat on a visitor’s head and soon after a door whooshes open to reveal the Hogwarts Express, you find yourself filled with the kind of giddy expectation you feel when getting your hands on a Potter book the day it’s released.
By GREG COOK | November 06, 2009

Slideshow: Final moments at the Rose?

Photos from what could be the final days at the Rose Art Museum
By JOEL VEAK | May 13, 2009

Will Brandeis sell out the Rose?

As the clock ticks down, the world-renowned museum confronts the art of survival
Will Brandeis take the money and run?
By GREG COOK | May 15, 2009

Will Brandeis lose its swagger?

Pass the Hat . . . Again
Ethnomusicologically invigorated Brandeis students and alumni are hoping for an outburst of criticism for the probable downsizing of Wayne Marshall.
By CHRIS FARAONE | April 02, 2009

Neo-rococo

Laurel Sparks at Yezerski, plus Julie Miller, Sheila Gallagher, Darren Foote, and Michael Ellis
Jamaica Plain's Laurel Sparks has become one of our best local abstract painters, as her new collection of bright, fun, juicy, abstracted chandeliers at Howard Yezerski Gallery attests.
By GREG COOK | February 20, 2009

The thinker at mid century

Size matters
A long time ago (say 70 years), in a galaxy far, far away (New York), a tired band of rebels ached to be the Next Big Thing.
By GREG COOK | January 27, 2009

Let me see your grill

The origins of the vagina dentata
If there’s one thing the new horror flick Teeth teaches us, it’s that nothing sours a romantic soirée like a vagina dentata.
By GREG COOK | January 25, 2008

Natural selections

Gorilla-made paintings at Franklin Park Zoo
The gorilla is a black blur, out of nowhere, barreling into the cage door — clang! — and then zooming off through the fake rocks and trees.
By GREG COOK | August 14, 2007

Ah, painting!

At the DeCordova, abstraction is new again
“Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century” rounds up 15 painters who reinvigorate abstraction by drawing inspiration and imagery from computers, stars and constellations, quantum physics, data mapping, the Internet, genetics, squiggly microscopic critters.
By GREG COOK | January 29, 2007

Fight the power

Artists protest war, scrutinize surveillance, explore usefulness, and embrace couture
Art mixes it up with history and politics, peers closely at electronic surveillance, worries about its own usefulness, traipses down the fashion runway, and brings cool stuff back from China and Puerto Rico in exhibitions opening this fall.
By RANDI HOPKINS | September 13, 2006

Variations and themes

“Webs, Loops, and Skeins” at the RISD Museum
The technique of the artist isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when you see a work — at least not a successful one.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | March 14, 2006