All posts by Jerry Saltz

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Photos of the Artists As Young Men: Robert Rauschenberg’s portraits of his extraordinary friends.

(clockwise) Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg From the very beginning of his mad, ecstatic, always-experimenting career, Robert Rauschenberg was looking at photographs. His hungry eye absorbed them; then they reappeared in his paintings, sculptures, and prints, …

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Why De Kooning Matters

On the eve of the AbEx master’s retrospective at MoMA, his biographer Mark Stevens chats with Jerry Saltz. Jerry Saltz: Mark, the Willem de Kooning biography...

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Missing Persons Posters from 9/11

After what Walt Whitman called “the huge first Nothing” of annihilation, with the psychic convulsions of a demonic force still redounding in the acrid air, the...

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Jerry Saltz on Lucian Freud (Dec 8 1922 – July 20 2011)

Before saying why Lucian Freud, who died 20 July 2011, is the strangest case of my own personal artistic taste, let’s first remember a few...

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Jerry Saltz Celebrates the Life and Art of Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly, a giant of post-war American Art, died 5 July 2011 at 83. Along with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he moved painting beyond the heroic...

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Help Jerry Saltz Build an Art Family Tree

Artists working for other artists is all about knowing, learning, unlearning, initiating long-term artistic dialogues, making connections, creating covens, and getting temporary shelter from the storm. These...

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Jerry Saltz: In the Future, Every Millionaire Will Buy and Sell Fifteen Warhols

  This spring, auction houses across the world alchemically turned Andy Warhol’s art into currency. One of his 1963 paintings of Liz Taylor sold for $27 million. A...

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Jerry Saltz’s Best and Worst of the Venice Biennale

At Venice's enormous, city-filling Biennale art exhibition, there are about 90 national pavilions, in which each country selects one or more artists to exhibit their work. In addition...

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Jerry Saltz on the Ugly American at the Venice Biennale

“This makes me embarrassed to be an American,” the megacurator of an extremely well-known U.S. art museum groaned to me. We were standing in front of what...

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Critic Cat Fight! Jerry Saltz’ anti anti-Jerry Saltz answer to architecture-critics who hissed about stance on AFAM.

Meow! Hiss! Yea! Critic cat fight. After I wrote about our beloved American Folk Art Museum closing, due partly to multiple architectural failures and...