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Sanford Schwartz

Sanford Schwartz’s reviews have been collected in The Art Presence and Artists and Writers. (July 2013)

  • Anselm Kiefer, in Love with Loss

    August 19, 2011

    Over the years, Kiefer’s work, continually summoning up Bible stories, wartime legends, and mystical awarenesses, has become woozily grandiloquent. He is an extraordinary showman, however. His pictures, where model ships or women’s frocks are often placed atop images of endless fields, the sea, or forests, can have a phenomenal physical presence. He is a master transformer of materials. From the first he made lead, steel, straw, glass, or crumbly clumps of cement with rebar sticking out bespeak fragility and delicacy.

  • Slide Show: Otto Dix

    July 20, 2010

    This summer, the Neue Galerie in New York is offering the first large-scale American exhibition of the gleefully provocative German painter Otto Dix (1891–1969)—providing a rare opportunity, as New York Review contributor Sanford Schwartz says, “to appreciate an artist who could almost be our contemporary.”

  • Innocuous Items Gone Creepily Wrong: Taking the Pulse of Art in New York

    March 31, 2010

    New Yorkers currently have two large exhibitions with which to take the pulse of contemporary art, and neither shows the patient feeling altogether well. At the Whitney Biennial, this time around presenting many videos along with paintings, installations, and artists’ collaboratives performing music, the spirit is retiring, docile, and a little like spending an afternoon at some lackluster shows in Chelsea.

  • Slide Show: Luc Tuymans

    January 22, 2010

    In “Gray Magic,” from the February 11 issue of The New York Review, Sanford Schwartz writes about the Luc Tuymans retrospective, which will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 6 to May 2. (It originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and will travel on to Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels; the catalog is edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth.) Below is a slide show of images from the exhibition, accompanied by excerpts from Schwartz’s review.

  • The Tender Art of David Park

    November 13, 2009

    David Park (1911–1960) is one of those artists who isn’t widely known but whose work inspires a special loyalty and warmth of feeling among his admirers. The partisan flavor his very name can arouse is partly dependent, of course, on his not being a household name to begin with. But Park, who was based in Berkeley, California, and was, along with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, one of the leading lights of what has been called “Bay Area” painting in the 1950s, makes some of us always eager to see more of his work and learn more about him because his best pictures have a particular tenderness and sense of gravity—a note that sets him apart from near-contemporaries of his such as Alice Neel, Fairfield Porter, or Alex Katz.