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my dad had a postcard when i was younger that I used to look at of a Leon golub painting— not this one, just a contorted face— but his paintings are a different type of representation or documentary approach of American life, maybe about the absent images that structure it.
do you remember last year or whenever when people thought that Philip guston paintings were going to Get their institutes canceled and almost censored that exhibition? It did end up showing at the national gallery, and my dad went to see it (he doesn’t really engage with art anymore but guston is his favorite painter) and talking about it he said something like “America will really be ready to change when there’s a national retrospective of Leon golubs paintings”
ao I think about that sometimes when I look at his paintings, which are in the end all about violence and rendered in these huge, textural scales
(This one is White Squad V)
Related Recs
Milton Avery, Bathers, Coney Island, 1934, oil on canvas
the first time i saw this painting in the Portland art museum, walking through the American art section with my free student ticket, i think i hated it a little. it was weird and the colors were queasy and i probably could have painted it myself.
well, i guess it grew on me over the next dozen of visits, because now i have to pay $20 to enter the museum and this is one of my favorite paintings ever. there’s something so unconsciously skillful about it to me, and extremely funny, as if the painter put me in on a joke. i even bought a museum postcard of it from eBay and framed it on my wall. on a particularly bad day in San Francisco i found myself in the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park, and the sight of another Milton Avery painting brought me to tears like i had encountered a close friend. Avery lived a fairly quiet life; he didn’t find success as a painter until later in life. when he did, he wasn’t particularly financially successful. but he created art every day and taught his daughter to do the same, he used color and shape in strange and oddly transformative ways, and he had a friendship with Mark Rothko, a fellow Portland native who i admire very much, that consisted of long nights of tea and talking.
how does any of this relate to how much i love this painting? maybe i just saw it enough times during a transformative period of my life. but i love it for its vague impressions of hot dog vendors, and tough but tender hearted italian dudes, and a working class new-york dream, and imperfect people enjoying themselves at the beach regardless of the queasiness and horrors of everyday life, regardless of strange shadows and monkey people. i love it for being so weird and progressive for 1930 and kind of goth and surreal. i hope you love strange paintings too, but if you don’t, that’s alright.
Jan 30, 2025
one of my favorite exhibitions of 2024, this quiet and unassuming show at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery moved me. includes his usual candy piles and ticker-tape-like timelines, the curatorial edge is in really interesting pairings with portraits from the museum’s collection. a portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas is juxtaposed with a photo of their flower-laden graves taken by González-Torres, decades later. i was floored to see a photo of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., given their relationship to and inaction around the AIDS epidemic, but the image was made more poignant against the somber and poetic backdrop of González-Torres’s work.
on view through early July ‘25.
Jan 15, 2025
by Francisco Goya
it’s one of his fourteen Black Paintings he painted on the walls of his house in his last years. this was in his dining room. all of the works in the series are haunting but this one stayed with me (literally, it’s now my phone case)
Jun 10, 2024
Top Recs from @blipkin
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forget if i put this here already, but this app and are.na are my favorite digital locations rn
brainchild of members of iconic design/art collective k-hole, it’s a place for making connections and shit
it’s like if Pinterest was more design forward and had cooler people and a lot of pdfs
follow me https://www.are.na/ben-lipkin
Jan 6, 2024
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You can dm them something and they’ll upload it! For free!
Dec 21, 2023
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old men named things like “Larry“ and “Bob” will respond with either confusion or desire, it feels more mystical than most religion, and is great fun. write to a friend, or someone you lost, or someone you want
Dec 20, 2023