Michael Lobel

@mlobelart.bsky.social

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Professor of Art History, Hunter College & CUNY Graduate Center. I look at things and then write about them.

Author of Van Gogh and the End of Nature, from Yale University Press: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300274363/van-g

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RIP artist Audrey Flack, one of the titans of Photorealism. Such sad news- I'd been talking with her in recent months, and she was just so incredibly lovely and vibrant www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/a...

David Hammons, Pray for America, 1969 www.moma.org/collection/w...

Philip Guston, San Clemente, 1975

Necessary vibe shift: Milton Avery, Dancing Trees, 1960

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Homeless people can be arrested for sleeping, Presidents cannot be arrested for rampant graft and corruption done while in office. There is no clearer a summary of "conservative 'law and order'" than this.

Walt Kuhn, Portrait of Clowns, 1939 www.artic.edu/artworks/118...

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I've posted this image before, but it's still so relevant today: in this 1936 editorial cartoon for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, artist Romare Bearden labeled the Supreme Court as "The Great Barrier to Equality"

Jacob Lawrence, "The Libraries Are Appreciated," from Lawrence's 1943 Harlem series, an image that depicts the Harlem Branch of the NY Public Library

Hooray for the New York Public Library! It's going to be open 7 days a week, thanks to the budget passed by the City Council today—and all the organizers who pushed to make this happen

Okay I get it, people are bummed today, but I feel like we could also use a little more David Wojnarowicz fight like hell energy

Since there's a lot going on today and a lot of people are feeling stressed & overwhelmed, maybe this is a good time to introduce all of you to early 20th-century artist Tade Styka and his distinctive painted dog portraits

I've been saying for the last few years that George Grosz is the historical artist whose work most captures the vibe of our own contemporary moment, and today I'm doubling down on that assessment (George Grosz, The Painter of the Hole I, 1948)

Goya, Two Old Men Eating Soup, c. 1819-23

An update on my Van Gogh book: turns out it's been selling so well that two days after its release it's already seeing some delays on Amazon😮. The good news: if you're interested, it can be ordered directly from Yale Press, which has plenty of copies available: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Van Gogh and the End of Natureyalebooks.yale.edu A groundbreaking reassessment that foregrounds Van Gogh’s profound engagement with the industrial age while making his work newly relevant for our world to...

So @peterhuestis.bsky.social has been noting a new video format from London's National Gallery, where a curator holds up a reproduction of an artwork to discuss it, rather than standing in front of the *actual* work in the museum. Can anyone help explain what's going on here? I for one am mystified

National Gallery, UK has a new video format where the curators hold up a reproduction of the work they're discussing held onto a ratty piece of cardboard with large binder clips. I don't get it. Has the video team been banned from gallery spaces?

A very happy birthday to the remarkable Patty Mucha, who turns 89 today!🎉 The left photo is from when I visited her in Vermont a few months ago; the other shows her in the 1960s with then-husband Claes Oldenburg along with the Floor Burger, one of the many products of their artistic collaborations

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I'm excited to share that today is the official publication date for my new book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature, from Yale University Press, which more firmly grounds Van Gogh within the industrial era in which he lived & worked (thread) yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Emma Amos's portrait of celebrated dancer & choreographer Katherine Dunham, who was born on this day in 1909

Edgar Degas, Factory Smoke, 1877-79, monotype on paper www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

Donald Sutherland posing for a Life magazine photographer in 1970. RIP

Since there's been a lively response to my first Jacob Lawrence post, here's another of my favorite pictures by him: his 1943 "Sidewalk Drawing," in which children sketching in colored chalk highlight art as a basic form of human expression

On Juneteenth, one of artist Jacob Lawrence's most joyful & exuberant images, his 1999 screenprint "Play"

Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of the Artist's Father, 1910

The absolutely stunning coloration of the local flora in San Juan Capistrano, CA

Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Death by Gun) is a stack of posters listing the more than 460 people killed by firearms during a single week in 1989. Viewers are invited to take a poster as the stack is constantly replenished www.moma.org/collection/w...

*the ghost of Martin Heidegger sheds a single tear*

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Vergogna (Shame), hand-colored illustration from Pozzoli's Dictionary of Mythology & Antiquity, 1819 archive.org/details/b293...

Since @chowleen.bsky.social let us know it's Maurice Sendak's birthday today, here's an eerie self-portrait he made at just 20 years of age. The volumetric treatment of his hand in contrast to flatness of other portions reminds me of an image MC Escher made just one year prior to Sendak's drawing

"and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day" Remembering Maurice Sendak, #botd in 1928. from Where the Wild Things Are - my favorite page in the book. It's Max's look of stoic resignation that I love so much. #everynightapoem #ofsorts

To mark painter Gustave Courbet's birthday (he was born on this day in 1819), one of my absolutely favorite responses to his notoriously scandalous picture "The Origin of the World"