Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism by Gary Gand My rating: 4 of 5 stars I grew up in a suburb where the kinds of houses described in this book provided welcome variation from the dominant ranches, colonials and split levels. (Indeed, I grew up visiting one of the houses featured in the book.) These buildings grasped at the actual promise of suburban living that, through lack of imagination, was thoroughly obscured where I typically commonly spent my childhood days. They were invariably set on heavily wooded lots. Their flat roofs and wide expanses of glass facing the trees meant they
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Jacksonville Attractions
Jacksonville, Florida, like many southern cities, is a treasure trove of roadside art
Continue readingReview: John Martin
John Martin by Martin Myrone My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was awed by the ultra-detailed epic paintings by John Martin I had seen at the Tate and the Smithsonian. The ridiculous level of detail and the apocalyptic imagery oscillate between brilliance and kitsch. This book, tied to an exhibition I’d dearly love to see, tries to explain why. It turns out there was more to Martin than meets the eye. Click here to see images of Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography
Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by Errol Morris My rating: 5 of 5 stars Errol Morris brings the same brilliant curiosity to this book about the nature of photographs as he does to his films. To appreciate this book you need to care deeply about photography, but if you do you likely will. View all my reviews
Continue readingNew Topographics
New Topographics by Britt Salvesen My rating: 5 of 5 stars This catalog from a reprise of a 1975 photography exhibit at Eastman House includes some of my long-standing favorite photographers, Stephen Shore and the Bechers, plus some others that are growing on me. The show was not well-received when first mounted but proved to be extremely influential in the rise of deadpan landscape photography. View all my reviews
Continue readingWoody Allen’s Lifestyles of the Rich
Saw Midnight in Paris last night. (The next youngest person in the theater was probably three times my daughter’s age, at least.) It was a good one — Owen Wilson did a creditable job as Woody Allen’s mouthpiece, and the modernist name dropping worked well. But more than anything the movie, especially the present-day sequences, reminded me that Allen’s most enduring concern — more than his neuroses or intellectual/anti-intellectual pretensions, urbanophilia, May-September romanticism or even humor — is illustrating the lifestyles of the very rich. That first struck me with Hannah and Her Sisters, but with each movie, good, bad
Continue readingGreat Gyros Signs
Here are some more masterpieces of prosaic art from around the world.
Continue readingFast Art: The Pointlessness of so Much
Art Chicago is an orgy of fast art. Scores of galleries haul out scads of work so visitors can plow up and down endless aisles burdened with art regressing toward the mean. The work, mostly by living artists, is mostly a blur. Occasionally something lends a booth enough gravity to slow you down, more often than not modernist paintings that you’ll never see in a museum since they’re privately owned (and not necessarily museum-quality pieces even if they’re museum-quality artists). This year the highlights for me were Chicago Imagist pieces of relatively recent vintage – works by Karl Wirsum, Gladys
Continue readingFabulous Roadside Vistas
A sampling of wonderful vistas that line — or in some cases used to line — the roadside coast to coast.
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Book Review: John Margolies, Roadside America
John Margolies, Roadside America, edited by Jim Heimann, with contributions by Phil Patton, C. Ford Peatross and photos by John Margolies. Taschen, 288 pages, about 400 color photos, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-8365-1173-5. Hard cover $39.99. The enthusiasm for vernacular expression that began flowering in the United States in the 1970s never quite gelled into a unified movement. Yet a new generation did learn to value the work of self-taught artists and a sizable coterie of writers, photographers, architects and others discovered an exterior landscape whose aesthetic dimension was almost entirely accidental, but all the more striking for it.
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