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Jason Farago

@jasonfarago

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Critic-at-large @nytimes

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Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel, “La Liberté éclairant le monde,” 1871–86 “To see either a sculpture or its mold from the inside was an unprecedented experience….Engineering’s redefinition of Bartholdi’s sculpture made it more like a canal, more like a passageway.” —Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, in “Colossal” “In a word, the confederation appears to me to be a shadow without a substance…” —George Washington, letter to John Jay, 1785 by @jasonfarago

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21 days ago

LOS ANGELES — A globe, 5 inches in diameter, embroidered in silk in 1817 by Lydia Satterthwaite of Chester County, Pennsylvania. I will have (a lot) more to say about the new LACMA soon. For now I just wanted to note the unexpectedly heavy presence of textiles in its world-spanning collection display: palampores and chaopaos, massive carpets and little swatches, all the velvet and cashmere against cold concrete. by @jasonfarago

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3 months ago

KYOTO — Chuichi Nishigaki, “X-Ray Room,” 1936. A lovely little bachelor machine byobu in the exhibition “Nihonga Avant-Garde” by @jasonfarago

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4 months ago

SAN FRANCISCO — Four seasons by two hands. Manet’s “Spring” (from the Getty), Morisot’s “Summer” (Musée Fabre), Manet’s “Autumn” (from Nancy, unfinished), Morisot’s “Winter” (Dallas): this not-quite-a-quartet of Parisiennes is united for the first time in “Manet and Morisot,” a show about a brother- and sister-in-law who each taught the other how to live a modern life. I’ve got complaints at the margins; I could sound off on what’s missing. But at its heart this is a show about modeling and marriage, and what we learn from friends and family: about how art, in alienating times, affirms we are never alone. 🌸🌻🍂❄️ by @jasonfarago

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5 months ago

Fair youth (Gainsborough, c. 1770-72, coll. Tate) by @jasonfarago

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5 months ago

BRIXEN/BRESSANONE, Italy — Learn to read. Adam Baldauf, martyrdom of St. Cassian (patron saint of schoolchildren and also stenographers), 1616 🔠 by @jasonfarago

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6 months ago

DRESDEN — In a china shop. Meissen rhinoceros, 1731, and other fragile things seen on my first visit to the Porzellansammlung 🦏 by @jasonfarago

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6 months ago

BARCELONA — Disputation of St. Catherine, painted c. 1241–1255 for the cathedral of Seu d’Urgell — and other marvels from my first visit to one of Europe’s greatest collections of Romanesque art by @jasonfarago

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7 months ago

Léger, “The Armistice,” 1918 by @jasonfarago

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9 months ago

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — Love is a fighter. Eros disguised in Heracles’s lion skin, c. 150–100 BC by @jasonfarago

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9 months ago

HUMLEBÆK, Denmark — I wish I had it more often, that sense I had when I first saw Kaari Upson at Ramekin a decade ago: that sense, as I tried to understand her resin and urethane sculptures drooped in a corner or sagging on a misaligned wall, that someone had given our lives new form. Her first posthumous retrospective, at the still special Louisiana Museum, confirmed for me that she was one of the greatest American artists of recent times. Upson’s art pitched into the uncanny but it was never uncomfortable; it took on scale from personal mythologies yet never became hermetic; it spoke an American idiom of media and McMansions, but always strove to account for the human body and human soul. I found it painful, looking out on the Øresund after my first of two visits, to think of what she would not make, even as I recalled how her own illness led her to these melancholy transmutations of bodies and beds. No secret, I’ve always struggled with Kelley and McCarthy and the LA abject; I have bad Apollonian habits, my LA is Ruscha’s and Ray’s. It wasn’t until I saw Upson’s shows at Ramekin, and later Massimo de Carlo in London, that I ever got the LA thing — not until I saw her refigured casts and negative spaces that I understood what formal ambitions can lie beneath the Californian mess. (She said to me once, when I asked about the bleeding colors of her mattresses: “If you presented anything at CalArts with four sides and a face, it was a painting.”) This is a tremendously moving show, in which the body, the house and the country become permeable, indistinct; all that is solid droops into silicone, and the wildfires always return. Worth the trip in every way, and here’s a bonus: the Louisiana children’s wing has a Kaari-4-Kidz workshop, where young fans can craft their mothers’ detached limbs from colored paper. by @jasonfarago

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10 months ago

FORT WORTH, Tex. — I’ve traveled to four cities now in the grip of the Torlonia Collection: Rome, Paris, Chicago and now here, where “Myth and Marble” at the @kimbellartmuseum may be the most beautiful display yet of these unbelievable Roman sculptures. As exquisite as they are, and as wonderful as it is to see these masterpieces hidden away since World War II, the marbles have also become strangely comforting to me. Recycled through the centuries, marriages of antique and modern stone, the Torlonia Marbles have shown me over these grim last years that there’s nothing to fear from the workings of time: that objects, empires, can be whole and fragmentary at once, that gods and rubble are made of the same stuff. This was the show of the year 5 years ago, when I saw it in an empty Capitoline. It still is. by @jasonfarago

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