Art February 2001
Making the case for figuration
On “Reconfiguring the New York School,” at the Center for Figurative Painting, New York.
Every city has its little, uncrowded museums offering special pleasures to the initiated. In Paris, theres the Musée Dapper, with its superb exhibitions of African art, hidden behind a bourgeois apartment house. In London, there are Sir John Soanes Museum, in Holborn, a marriage of rationalism and idiosyncracy, and the Soane-designed Dulwich Picture Gallery, in the depths of SE 21, a rare combination of marvelous paintings and innovative architecture; each of them is celebrated in its way, but so sparsely visited that I tend to think of them as private treasures. In London, too, Im partial to the Sigmund Freud Museum: the house where he lived and worked for the last year of his life, a slice of Mitteleuropa transplanted from Vienna to a quiet Hampstead streetlibrary, antiquities, and all, including, of course, the famous desk and couch. What may be the ultimate obscure...
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