By Ekin Erkan

By AR Hoffman

The artist, Wayne Thiebaud, is a perpetual boy of summer, alert to America’s fling with the season’s sweet irresponsibility.

By James Panero

The advent of summer can be particularly sweet when it comes with a helping of Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021). The late grand-manner painter of American Century marginalia remains on view at Acquavella Galleries through mid-June with an exhibition that focuses on his warmest creations. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” gathers works from over six decades of the artist’s career, ranging from his bathers, beaches, and balls to his cola, confections, and cones.

Although he also produced pensive portraits and idyllic landscapes, the artist’s best-known images are of ice cream, cakes and other colorful sweets.

The late painter Wayne Thiebaud's sun-splashed perspective on life's simpler, happier moments is filling Acquavella Galleries in New York through mid-June.

Where Impressionists had their favorite cathedrals or lily pads, Bonnard’s masterpieces came alive at home. Acquavella focuses on his later years, from the 1920s to 1940s, and showcases the wonders of simply laid tables and balanced baskets of fruit and fantastic landscapes rushing through the windows. 

By Travis Diehl.

New York galleries are opening locations around the country as local collector bases appeal.

Bonnard worked with contradiction as well as the rapture of color, atmospheric effects and quotidian objects, and this process of seeing and being part of that world makes his paintings works of philosophy as well as sensuality. 

This exhibition looks at three decades of Bonnard nudes, interiors, and landscapes. Special attention is paid to his sense of composition and color, which influenced artists as various as Mark Rothko, Alex Katz, and Lois Dodd. 

The French modernist painter Pierre Bonnard holds a special place at Acquavella Galleries in New York. 

The owners are drawn to Bonnard’s brilliant color palette and absorbing compositions, says third-generation co-owner Nick Acquavella. The artist is also important to the gallery because of a calculated risk by founder Nicholas Acquavella that led to a pivotal sale of Bonnard’s paintings at a 1966 exhibition by the Manhattan dealer. 

All of this may be in the background but it informs “Pierre Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing,” a loan exhibition of more than 20 works from the artist’s last 30 years that is open to the public April 12 to May 26 at Acquavella Galleries in New York. 

“Tom Sachs: Spaceships" comes in for a landing February 10 at Acquavella's Palm Beach gallery.

“I don’t really care if a thing is a painting or a sculpture or a cathedral or a sneaker. It’s all art to me.” - Tom Sachs

Following Art Basel, the New York-based painter’s forthcoming exhibition at Acquavella’s Palm Beach gallery, “Our Love is Here to Stay,” stems from a summer in Maine.

By Osman Can Yerebakan

Documenting his ‘Spaceships’ exhibition at Acquavella Galleries.

Want to see new art in New York this weekend? 

In his new show at New York's Acquavella, "Spaceships," the contemporary artist rethinks space travel as a method for spiritual transport.

The human appetite for landscape paintings is apparently infinite, and this show of no fewer than twenty-eight artists in its New York version (there was a second edition in Palm Beach, which like this one was curated by Todd Bradway) emulates that infinity. How easy it would be to get lost in all these painted forests!

Top shows to see in New York during Frieze week: From Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke at Acquavella Galleries to Deana Lawson at the Guggenheim

As he turns 100, the California artist's paintings of cakes, pies and other ordinary diner fare have become iconic.

By Emily Bobrow 

Celebrate Thanksgiving with Luigi Valadier's luxurious tableware, James Rosenquist's Americana and a family-friendly show on Corduroy the bear.

A new James Rosenquist exhibition is as enigmatic and bold as the artist. James Rosenquist: His American Life will run at Acquavella Galleries until December 7th.

The upcoming exhibition at Acquavella Galleries will examine the domains of Rosenquist's highly poetical visions, with a special focus on Post-War America.

Artspace worked with Damian Loeb to curate an online exhibition of alumni from the New York Academy of Art, the graduate school in Tribeca, where students are taught traditional methods and techniques, combined with rigorous critical discourse. Here the artist talks about the exhibition. 

Acquavella Galleries’ exhibition of the Uruguay-born Modernist is a primer for the uninitiated and a treasury of rarely seen gems.

Best known for his paintings of cakes and ice cream, Wayne Thiebaud, is also surprisingly talented, if orthodox, when it comes to works on paper.

By Andrew Butterfield

A surprising number of collectors and even dealers feel they lack understand and fear making judgements. No wonder the art world is full of anxious conformity.

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Jacob El Hanani makes minutely detailed, dazzlingly obsessive drawings without the aid of a magnifying glass. Now seventy, he works in ten-minute bursts to avoid damaging his eyes. He spends months, even years, on a single composition. He uses ink on paper or a quill on gessoed canvas. These, at least, are the stable facts of El Hanani’s practice. Everything else about his art dwells in lush and disorienting ambiguity.

Most obvious is the question of where the viewer is meant to stand in relation to El Hanani’s drawings. His second exhibition here covers four decades. The drawings are so faint that they seem like shy living things, lingering between visibility and invisibility, reluctant to fully appear. Thirteen works on canvas line the front gallery. Fifteen smaller works on paper fill the back gallery, all behind glass. You almost have to mash your face into them to understand the extreme precision of El Hanani’s marks.

Drawings such as Untitled (from the Mondrian Series), 2011, and Linescape (from the J.W. Turner Series), 2014–15, demand you do a little dance before them—a few steps back to see formless abstractions, a few steps forward to decipher elaborate city grids and oceanic textures. Born in Casablanca, raised in Tel Aviv, and based in New York since the early 1970s, El Hanani is deeply indebted to the Jewish tradition of micrography. But as his titles suggest, he is also clearly invested in questions of modernism, urban rhythm, and the natural sublime. The best piece in the show, Alhambra, 2016, gives Islamic geometry a minimalist spin. What begins as a question of pure form—the endless possibilities of a steady, hand-drawn line—ends in a dense, fascinating matrix of mixed-up histories, geographies, and cultural movements.

By Lane Florsheim

The artist's new show 'Linescape' opens October 2 at Acquavella Gallery in New York.

Jacob El Hanani's studio is immaculate. The hardwood floors gleam and neat rows of books are stacked along shelves against walls near the entrance. During my visit, he takes out various binders, exhibition catalogs and drawings before returning each to its exact place in a filing cabinet or drawer below one of the two tables where he draws. "It's always like this," he says.

In the context of his work, El Hanani's neatness coheres. From a distance, his pieces look abstract: a hazy gray square on canvas, a roiling atmospheric formation, a collection of intersecting lines. But standing closer one notices that each shape is in turn composed of thousands of tiny lines, made with a quill or a Rapidograph techinical pen. Sometimes El Hanani, who has been called the grandfater of micro-drawing, draws miniscule characters from the Hebrew alphabet, referencing the Judaic tradition of micrography. "Usually, I don't get the 'Wow.' I get the, 'How?'" he explains as I inspect one. It would be easy enough to pass a drawing of his by without noticing the innumerable marks -- they unfold to the viewer like a secret. 

For decades, El Hanani has been driven by the desire to bring drawing to this extreme in an attempt to break the notion that miniature is a small-scale work. "When I moved to New York in the '70s, everything was, My car is bigger than your car and my apartment is bigger than your apartment," he says. "Now it's, My cell phone is smaller than yours. My gadget is smaller than yours. So, the miniaturization of the planet..." he considers. "Well, the Japanese already started that 400 years ago."

The number of hours it takes to achieve the precision found in every centimeter of his work defies today's ethos of efficiency and reverence of technology. Younger viewers, he says, often don't believe the pieces are by hand, or done without the help of an assistant. Later, he mentions he hasn't accomplished all he wants to do, like spending a whole year, uninterrupted, on only one piece. Even though some of his works have taken years, he is always working on a number of drawings.

El Hanani's new show Linescape opens October 2 at Acquavella Galleries in New York and covers nearly forty years of his practice. "I would call myself a line-maker," he says of the show title. "When people say to me, 'What do you do for a living?' I say, 'I make lines' ... Is a line-maker something in football?" he adds, seeming sincere. He categorizes his earlier work as more austere, in keeping with minimalism's de rigeur opposition to figuration in the '70s. He sees his recent pieces, some of which reference Piet Mondrian's grid paintings and J.M.W. Turner's vivid landscapes, as freer.

El Hanani was born in Casablanca and moved to Israel when he was seven, where he was "the artist of the kids," copying the drawings of Albrecht Dürer and Giorgio Morandi. He spent two years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in his twenties before moving to New York City "for the space." A tthe time, he explains, artists could only get 200 or 300 square feet in Paris for the price of 3,000 in New York. Once in New York City, he eliminated every trace of figuration from his work in 1972 and found his new process demanded 12 hours a day. He worked constantly. "I was able to survive without having a day job. If I sold a drawing, I paid my rent. That generation was really supportive of artist and art."

El Hanani's work develops organically, without subjects in mind, but sometimes he finds personal or historical meaning in a piece after it is complete. He once made a series of drawings that turned out to be gauze fabric and then learned that Gaza is thought to be the origin of gauze. "Gaza was important to me because when I was in the Israeli army, we occupied the West Bank. I've been twice in Gaza," he says. "Unconsciously, I figure, I ended up drawing gauze."

During my visit, El Hanani also shows me the darwings he doesn't exhibit: the sheets he fills with figurative doodles (eight favorites are framed and displayed on the wall) and a binder of his cartoons, explaining that, like Michael Jordan playing golf to unwind, artists relax by making different kinds of art. "My case was being a paparazzi cartoonist quietly in a cocktail when nobody could see me," he says. He shows me the likenesses of Norman Mailer, Henry Kissinger and a young Donald Trump along with many others.

When he opens the drawer to one of his cabinets, revealing a charcoal sketch of a nude model sitting on her knees, he says quickly, "It's not important. Hundreds of artists do that in art school." But then he adds: "However, sixty years from now, my son will be 74. And I'm dead, and if someone says, 'Oh you have a drawing of your father's from 100 years ago?' Suddenly it becomes important for a collector."

"All that we can do is leave the pile slightly higher than what it was. I'll be known for making little, tiny lines," he says. "Period. You cannot achieve a lot in art. You have to make your own contribution." 

By David Cohen

Scriptural injunctions against graven images and puritanical disdain for decoration or ornament for their own sake engendered an ingenious work around from medieval artists: micrography. Miniscule but nonetheless legible script is arranged into otherwise prohibited or discouraged forms, sometimes whimsical, sometimes expressive of the text itself. Fast forward to minimal art and its inherent iconoclasm and Casablanca-born, Israel-raised, Paris-educated, New York-based Jacob El Hanani pulls from his “portable ark of the covenant” (in R. B. Kitaj’s phrase, from First Diasporist Manifesto) the mind bogglingly ethereal feat that is his application of this ancestral technique to a contemporary abstract idiom. These days, however, there is a relative loosening-up of his approach, as the artist acknowledges in titles that evoke landscapes by Turner and cityscapes by Mondrian. As El Hanani explains, “For many decades, I was working under a self-imposed austerity, but many artists, as they get older, release themselves and tend to embrace a freer, more lyrical style.”

Veteran gallerist and art dealer Michael Findlay is staging an all-out war against Art Attention Deficit Disorder.

Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, doesn’t exactly need another job.

He is chairman of the Hispanic Society of America; a professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts; an honorary trustee of the Prado Museum; and a host of the PBS TV program “NYC-ARTS.”

But now Mr. de Montebello has decided to add yet one more, becoming a director of Acquavella Galleries, effective immediately, where he will focus on the curation of special exhibitions and the development of publications.

Over the course of a frustrating afternoon in 1961, Wayne Thiebaud visited every single gallery on Madison Avenue, New York, to try to sell his paintings. By then, he was in his early 40s, had recently become a professor of art at the University of California and counted such giants as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning among his friends. But he had not yet made his own name as an artist.

The artist Wayne Thiebaud renders everyday delights strange and vibrant. Long celebrated for his peppy still life paintings and fantastical landscapes, the 96-year-old California native is currently in London for a survey show at the city’s White Cube gallery.

Joan Miró was a small, fastidious, taciturn Catalan. Alexander Calder was a big, rumpled, gregarious American. At first glance, they would appear to hail from distant planets. Yet once they met in Paris in 1928, they enjoyed an unusually close and mutually beneficial friendship that lasted until Calder’s death in 1976. With other artistic pairs, like Pissarro and Cézanne or Picasso and Braque, competitiveness ignited and acrimony at times soured the creative ferment. But Miró and Calder unfailingly championed and nourished each other’s work. A principle that Calder applied to his art could also describe their relationship: “Disparity in form, color, size, weight, motion, is what makes a composition.”

By Hilarie M. Sheets

The New York artist has been studying astronomy and high-tech photography to produce works that reveal the wonders of space.

Preview of Damian Loeb's exhibition, "Sgr A*," by Annie Block.

Pace and Acquavella Galleries team up next April to present "constellation" works by the two artists

An artist who got his start in the late ‘90s as a raffish bad-boy painter of hyperrealist Hollywood “film stills” yanked from appropriated materials (or photographs of his wife), often with a healthy helping of transgressive bedroom voyeurism á la Eric Fischl, Damian Loeb was a market sensation, then critical cat toy, then where-are-they-now question mark. For the past several years the answer to that question has been Acquavella, the aristocratic gallery in a townhouse on New York’s Upper East Side ... He has a new show opening at Acquavella this February. 

Towards the upper end of the spectrum on day one in Miami was a remarkable 1964 canvas by Kenneth Noland, Mach II, which sold from Acquavella Galleries in the fair’s first hours ... Acquavella said that dealers, like her family’s, have been experiencing the same supply constraints that have hobbled the secondary market over the past year. Sensing uncertainty in the market, collectors have shown significant reticence to offer up top-quality material. And like in the secondary market, when they have decided to sell, much of the material has been kept private. “That’s the bulk of our business,” she said, noting that fairs serve more as a form of advertising. “That’s why we really try to bring an array of things.” This time, that ranges from the Noland and a set of Andy Warhol “Dolly Partons” to paintings by rising Chinese abstract painter Wang Yan Cheng and Spanish painter and ceramist Miquel Barceló.

Tefaf in Manhattan; sold to the anchor from CNN; Trump in the nude

By Colin Gleadell

In my early days as an art market reporter, London’s most powerful dealer in modern art, Leslie Waddington, told me that, in his view, the most important 20th century European artist, after Picasso, Leger and Miro was Jean Dubuffet.

“Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions” on display at 18 East 79th Street, is a show devoted to the early work of the French artist who coined the term “art brut,” is the sort of in-depth, big-ticket exhibition that only a few galleries can pull off, and even fewer are inclined to mount.

Opening: “Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions” at Acquavella Galleries

Presenting early works in painting and sculpture by renowned French artist Jean Dubuffet, this compelling exhibition (organized by art historian Mark Rosenthal) focuses on the artist’s development of his signature Art Brut style, which was inspired by children’s drawings and the art of the mentally ill (what we now call Outsider

Art.) Made between 1943 and 1959, the expressive works in the show, which are accompanied by a catalogue published by Rizzoli, include major loans from museums and private collections.

Acquavella Galleries, 18 East 79 Street, New York, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

The French artist’s early work in painting and sculpture is showcased at the New York-based gallery this month.  By Thomas Gebremedhin.

It seems that when Jean Dubuffet is mentioned, it's almost always in the context of Outsider art, a field that he helped definie and promote and that is currently enjoying a surge of interest. But Dubuffet was a major artist in his own right, and an exhibition at Acquavella Galleries aims to put the focus back on the man himself and his subversive creativity. "Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions" (April 15 - June 10) is the first show of the artist's early paintings and sculptures--generally considered to be his best and most powerful--to be mounted in over 20 years (the last one was at the Hirshhorn in 1993). Curated by Mark Rosenthal of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, it combines works from Acquavella's holdings with loans from public and private collections, in the kind of museum-like presentation that is increasingly prevalent at high-end galleries in this country.

The works on view date from 1943-59, the years of Dubuffet's boldest expeirmentation. Typical is L'adieu à la fenêtre (Farewell from the Window), from 1949, in which the figures and the surrounding landscape are scratched like graffiti into a monochrome layer of brown oil paint on burlap. The overall effect is deliberately childlike and cartoonish. In the early 1940s, with Europe in the throes of total war, it seemed to many that Western civilization was bankrupt and doomed. Dubuffet's response was to assume an "anticultural" stance that eschewed convention and decorum in both art and life. Influenced by the German psychiatrist Hanks Prinzhorn's 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Dubuffet came to believe that the art of the insane, as well as that of young children, tapped into an intuitive, spontaneous creativity unavailable to traditional art. He organized an exhibition of this "raw art" (art brut) in 1947, and emulated it in his own work.

Dubuffet first studied art when he was 18, but it wasn't until he was in his early 40s that he was able to fully devote himself to it. (Until then he was involved in running the family wine business.) "But as soon as he became an artist," says Rosenthal, "he was lionized as an enfant terrible who was constantly undermining traditions in portraiture, landscape, and abstraction." Dubuffet started using natural mateirals like gravel, cement, broken bottles, leaves, dust, and butterfly wings. "His pictures are lumpy with it, like volcanic slag," says Rosenthal. Noting that the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, in southern France, were discovered right around this time, Rosenthal describes Dubuffet's figures as a "a band of individuals who look like they just emerged from the earth. He's consumed with the subject of the earth."

In the '50s, Dubuffet's work became less figurative, but even then, says Rosenthal, "the surfaces are made to look like earth, like you're looking at the ground." In this respect, Dubuffet had a huge influence on artists such as Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and Alberto Burri. "He was the one most responsible for introducing experimentation with materials," says Rosenthal. "It's long overdue for us to figure out who this fountainhead of art was."

The Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Musée national Picasso-Paris organize a joint event dedicated to Miquel Barceló. Numerous pieces, never-presented before, allow visitors to discover the Majorcan artist’s universe. Paintings and ceramics are presented at the Musée national Picasso-Paris while the engraved works are put on display at the BnF.

Miquel Barceló’s engraved works that stand as a major part of the artist’s production are rarely presented. The artist, painter, sculptor and ceramist, has also been trying his hand at printing techniques since the beginning of his career. Rich and deeply original, his printed works gather nearly 250 copper and wood engravings, lithographs, screen prints and stampings. Although a self-sufficient part of the artist’s production, these pieces remain an integral part of his protean work because of their fundamentally experimental dimension.

The BnF naturally decided to present this little-known part of his work in parallel with drawings, sculptures, ceramics and paintings. Visitors are invited to follow a thematic path built around a selection of 60 recent or very old prints accounting for the coherence and singularity of his artistic approach.

A monumental fresco made of soil and daylight was created in situ across the full height of the windows of the Julien Cain alley that the artist covered with a fine coat of clay before scraping the dried material. An outstanding introduction to the exhibition, this 190 metre-length over 6-metre high fresco immerses visitors in Barceló’s bewitching universe.

Review of "Wordplay" exhibition on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 11, 2016.  The show features three drawings by Jacob El Hanani from the museum's permanent collection.

The art dealer extraordinarire shares what to see and do in Miami.

An artist with works in the permanent collections of the top museums across the country and countless awards and honorary degrees might be expected to slow down a bit in his or her later years. But not Wayne Thiebaud. The American painter turns 95 on November 15 and is celebrating with a new monograph published by Rizzoli that explores his extensive career.

Directors Michael Findlay & Ken Yeh included in Art & Auction's annual power issue.

Opening: “Riopelle | Miró: Color” at Acquavella Galleries

An unusual artistic pairing, this exhibition features painted bronze sculptures by the Spanish modernist master Joan Miró and oil paintings by the French abstract expressionist Jean Paul Riopelle. Although their styles were quite different, the two artists were friends, had the same dealers and once even shared a studio in the South of France. The show presents Mr. Miró’s vividly painted bronzes of assembled found objects alongside Mr. Riopelle lusciously painted abstractions.

Acquavella Galleries, 18 East 79 Street, New York, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Interview with Eleanor Acquavella, Co-Owner:

How did you get your start as a gallerist?

My first job in the art world was the the Phillips Collection, where I worked for a summer during college under then-director Charlie Moffett. I absolutely loved it, and I decided that I wanted to work with and around art for the rest of my life. After college I worked at Sotheby's in various departments. After two years had passed, my father and I both felt it was time for me to start my career at the gallery.

How have you generally discovered new artists? Are there any new discoveries for the gallery whom you're especially excited about?

Usually, our discoveres beginw ith us as collectors - we purchase and live with artists that are new to us and then see how their careers and work develop over time. For example, Jacob El Hanani is an artist I discovered at a works-on-paper fair, and I bought one of his drawings on the spot. I purchased a few more over the years, and that relationship culminated in the show we have up now.

What was your biggest show of the past year?

Probably the show of Basquiat drawings from the Schorr Collection.

What's one show you loved in the past year at a gallery other than your own?

Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks.

If cost were no object, what work of art would you have in your bedroom?

I could spend hours and hours thinking about this ... I guess I would say a Matisse. I couldn't imagine a better way to start the day.

What do the likes of Sir Edmund Hillary, the famed mountaineer credited with the first conquest of Everest, and the scribal mystics of medieval Judaism have in common? Nothing, it would seem—except that they meet in the extraordinary work of Jacob El Hanani. With all the quiet intensity of a monk absorbed in selfless devotion to the word of God, and a considerable dose of climber’s hubris, El Hanani has made a career out of testing the limits of human endurance. Armed with only a fine-point pen and the discipline of a military general, this artist has brought drawing to places few of us might care to go. But experienced from the armchair of viewership, the work is as breathtaking in its beauty as it is profound in its implications about the human urge toward—and need for—self-transcendence.

With this show, the Israeli artist’s first New York solo in over a decade, we have a rare opportunity to see a range of drawings created in the last eight years. Acquavella’s cavernous interior is an apt setting for the thirteen modest- to mid-sized pieces on view; both stately and austere, it echoes the work’s curiously dual nature. Bright, open, and largely devoid of sensory distractions, the space encourages exactly the kind of viewing demanded here: close, concentrated, and sustained.

The emphasis is on close, for it is by no bit of admirer’s hyperbole that El Hanani is known as the “grandfather of micro-drawing.” Indeed, from the conventional viewing distance, one sees only soft rectangles of atmospheric haze surrounded by generous margins of untouched paper. But at nose distance, innumerable discrete marks emerge—some no larger than a particle of dust—whose dense accretions coalesce into the shimmering fields we see from a few steps back. While the marks vary from tiny linear strokes to long hair-like strands to letters from the Hebrew alphabet, the abstract images they form evoke landscapes, ambiguous cartographies, or, most overtly, textiles. But as Arthur Danto suggested in the show’s catalogue essay, the images are epiphenomenal to the work’s primary focus: the marks themselves. That the latter are hand-drawn—a fact crucial to the work’s appreciation—is evident within every inch of drawn surface: wobbly, irregular, and subtly varied in weight and density, the lines exude human presence. 

While the unfathomable labor-intensiveness of the artist’s practice—what we might call its “wow factor”—announces itself with much volume, the work is rooted in a tradition born of devotional silence. An element of kabbalic exegesis, the scribal art of micro-calligraphy, in which minuscule Hebrew letters are used to compose images adorning sacred texts, dates back some thousand years. The sanctity of the Hebrew alphabet being a fundamental tenet of the kabbalah, one can imagine the impulse that gave rise to this practice. If the letters were thought to be the means by which God brought the world into being, intimate and prolonged contact with them brought the artist-scribe into Divine communion. Like chant or incantation, it is a meditative practice whose use of language transcends the latter’s rational dimension, transforming it into a vehicle for ecstatic experience. 

While allusions to sacred writing are implicit throughout, some of the drawings bear their origins more conspicuously than others. The Hebrew Barbed Wire(2013) is one of the most explicit in this regard. Here, undulating threads of Hebrew text crisscross an expansive horizontal field. The reader of Hebrew might wish for a magnifying glass, but ultimately the work’s appeal lies not in what it says but in the intensity of the process by which it was brought into being. In other drawings, such as those in the particularly beautiful “Linescape”series (2012), letters give way to loose parallel hatches whose irregular swirls suggest tempests (indeed, the series’s subtitle gives a nod to J.M.W. Turner). In the show’s densest piece, Crosshatched (1999), the pockets of negative space that punctuate the other drawings are all but abandoned. Here, microscopic clusters of crosshatched lines create an allover field so vibratory and alive it is virtually palpable. The effect is one of an unusually acute—and largely ineffable—attunement with Being. 

Perhaps it is in this awakening of our subtler senses that the work achieves its greatness. If so, it is an experience that can arise only after one’s awe over the work’s facture has settled—or, otherwise put, once the artist himself has receded from the picture. And herein lies the work’s central paradox: for all its strenuous asceticism, there is an element of egotism in El Hanani’s practice. After the initial “Wow,” it is difficult not to dwell on the question of “How,” which can hinder deeper, more substantial contemplation. The sheer feat that each piece represents can be a distraction. It is a danger that plagues much “endurance art,” not unlike that which can threaten to turn work of monumental scale into mere spectacle.

But perhaps there is another way of understanding the work’s allure. The urge toward self-transcendence, which is the impulse behind all ecstatic disciplines, would not exist were the self not conflicted. Twofold always—with longings for both singularity and identification with a larger whole—we are all, in this sense, a problem to ourselves. With equal parts hubris and humility, El Hanani’s work is a powerful testament to a human pathos that reaches in both directions. And just as Edmund Hillary was less singular in his accomplishment than he might have liked us to believe (we now know he was accompanied by Tenzing Norgay, an intrepid Sherpa), El Hanani is preceded by many an equally possessed mind striving for self-conquest. But in the realm of contemporary drawing, he stands on that mountain alone.

Jacob El Hanani's splendid drawings suggest that all art is autobiographical and that abstraction is a part of human nature.  Potentially paradoxical, these cojoined ideas are also linked to another contradictory pair: our simultaneous need to reveal and cocneal ourselves.  El Hanani's meticulous pen-and-ink (his only medium) drawings are encoded self-expression, an aesthetic of secrecy.

For example, The Hebrew Barbed Wire (2013) appears at a distance to be a mass of loosely woven barbed wire.  We see the wire, and we see through the tangle.  Inspected at close range the barbed wire turns into the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.  To inscribe those letters is to evoke a millenial tradition; to run them into barbed wire is to allude to past horros and current restraints.  The alphabet simultaneously protecs and imprisons.  At the same time, the drawing floats before us, visually divorced both from barbed wire and Hebrew, a beautiful object.

Less obviously related to El Hanani's personal past is Gauze (2011), a drawing of a piece of textile.  Certainly the relationship between text and textile comes to the point of this superb piece, but gauze is the sheer fabric we use to bind wounds and is thought to get its name from Gaza, where it was made.  An excellent catalogue essay by the late Arthur Danto accompanies the exhibition.

By Rachel Corbett

Longtime collectors like Herbert and Lenore Schorr are luckier than most. In 1981, while visiting the Annina Nosei Gallery, which was then on Prince Street in SoHo, the couple met Jean-Michel Basquiat, fell in love with his work and bought one of his paintings. That purchase was quickly followed by others — drawings as well as canvases — and, over the years, the Schorrs amassed one of the most important Basquiat collections in the country. The Schorrs also became friends with the artist, who died of a drug overdose at 27 in 1988, and occasionally bought a painting or drawing right out of his Manhattan studio.

Sigmund Freud became famous by psychoanalyzing mankind’s crazy antics. If only he had seen what his grandson, the painter Lucian Freud, got up to: paying his bookies off with art, spending time with his adult children by painting them naked…

Speakeasy sat down recently with David Dawson, Freud’s studio assistant from 1989 until Freud’s death in July 2011. Mr. Dawson’s photos of the artist are currently on display at Vienna’s Sigmund Freud Museum, coinciding with a Freud retrospective at the city’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Here, an edited transcript.

Ken Yeh, former Chairman of Christie’s Asia, has been appointed director of New York’s Acquavella Galleries. Assuming the role in May 2013, Yeh will develop the gallery’s business in Asia while based in New York and Hong Kong. With 15 years at Christie’s specializing in Impressionist and Modern Art, Yeh has established strong relationships with Asian collectors worldwide. “This opportunity at Acquavella is a great chance to work with one of the best galleries, if not, the best gallery in the world,” Yeh said in a phone interview on Monday. “I am sad to leave Christie’s, and it was not an easy decision, but I felt like this was the right time for me to make a career move.”
 

Enoc Perez’s lushly figured paintings of modernist buildings at once exploit and question the seductions of architecture as well as painting itself. The exhibition presents two new bodies of work, one focusing on the Marina Towers in Chicago and the other a commissioned painting of the Watergate in Washington, D.C. These architectural portraits evoke modernism’s futurist aspirations as well as the sadness of an always-impossible ideal.
 

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James Rosenquist Shows New Work at New York's Acquavella Galleries

Review of Acquavella Galleries Director Michael Findlay's book, "The Value of Art" by Alexandra Peers.

Book published by Prestel, 176 pages, $29.95.

Review of Acquavella Director Michael Findlay's new book "The Value of Art" by Brian Boucher.

Book published by Prestel, 176 pages, $29.95.

Review of Acquavella Director Michael Findlay's new book "The Value of Art" by Dan Duray.

Book published by Prestel, 176 pages, $29.95.

Review of Acquavella Director Michael Findlay's new book by Milton Esterow.

Book published by Prestel, 176 pages, $29.95.

A review of James Rosenquist's masterpiece, "F-111", on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. By Richard B. Woodward.

There's terrible beauty and lost innocence in the portraits and drawings of the late Lucian Freud, as Ossian Ward discovers

Sometimes, only after an artist has died can you see their work as a whole. That’s certainly the case
with Lucian Freud.

The National Portrait Gallery has gathered by far the best large selection of Lucian Freud’s work, says Richard Dorment, including plenty of surprises

Lucian Freud painted strange, uneasy, figures, from first to last. Maybe they were uneasy because he was painting them. There was as much violence as tenderness in his stare, and in the ways he devised to paint...

"I really used the mirror as a device for an interior on a small scale," he explained. "Always the same mirror, which I like and know." For Lucian Freud the knowing and liking were mutually vital and this five-foot Georgian overmantel mirror stayed with him. It had come down in the world by the time he first set eyes on it in 1943 in the hallway at 20 Delamere Terrace, in what was then slum Paddington. It became one of his few possessions in the upstairs flat there overlooking the canal, along with a stuffed zebra head...

The fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art has a new resident. James Rosenquist's F-111, a monumental 23-panel piece, is being exhibited for the first time since 2006 in the original 1965 configuration that the artist created for his debut show at Leo Castelli's 77th Street gallery...

Lunch with the FT:  During a heatwave in New York, the influential art dealer talks to Peter Aspden about changes in the art world, and his personal and professional relationship with Lucian Freud. 

NEW YORK— "Artists for Haiti," a charity auction organized by actor Ben Stiller and art dealer David Zwirner and held at Christie's this evening raised a rousing $13,662,000 to benefit health and education initiatives for the earthquake-ravaged and desperately poor Caribbean country.

"The Players' Club"
The auction floor is the ultimate shark tank. Meet its most ruthless predators.
Anyone who thinks the art world is dull hasn't visited an auction house's sales room. This is a place where the people with the foresight to sell wield just as much powers as those who can buy; where dealers bid into the millions just to maintain the value of their stock; and where advisers play the field in order to drive up their commissions. We polled dozens of art-world insiders to compile a list of the 10 most powerful people in the auction world today. They're the ones spending the most money, making the most money, and defining the market as we know it.

Lucian Freud, the British realist painter and famed libertine, and his genteel New York dealer, William Acquavella, have a 20-year relationship based on creative support and a little bit of damage control.

A half-century ago, before the phrase "Pop Art" was even coined, a taxi tycoon named Robert C. Scull started buying up dozens of works by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol...

BEIJING — A new studio designed by Zeng Fanzhi is a vivid testament to the riches reaped by China’s hottest contemporary artists.

By HOLLAND COTTER

By PATRICIA ZOHN

By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT

By LINDSAY POLLOCK