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Michael Lobel
@mlobelart.bsky.social
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: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300274363/van-g
2k followers62 following1.2k posts
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MLmlobelart.bsky.social

I've always loved this photo of Josef Albers teaching with a very young Ray Johnson - who would go on to become one of the leading practitioners of Mail Art - looking studious in a white t-shirt in the foreground

A classroom setting. An older man stands before a group of students, gesticulating, apparently lecturing to them. In the foreground a young, sandy-haired man in a white t-shirt looks to take notes
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Black Mountain College's progressive values were fully on view in 1946, when Josef Albers invited Jacob Lawrence (with wife Gwendolyn Knight, below) to teach at the school. Due to racial segregation in South at the time, Albers hired a private train car to transport the Lawrences to & from Asheville

Artists Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence
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With Asheville isolated due to damage from Tropical Storm Helene, a reminder of how important the area, through presence of Black Mountain College, was to 20th-century art, including in figure of Anni Albers, European émigré who taught there & pursued innovative experiments in weaving & textiles

A black-and-white photo of a woman at a weaving loom, seen from the side, a bandana or kerchief pulled tight around her head
A woven textile in red, blue, black, and white, with meandering pattern woven through it
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Willem de Kooning, Asheville, 1948. The title of the painting references de Kooning's time teaching at Black Mountain College, the influential mid-20th-century experimental arts school located near the town of Asheville, North Carolina www.phillipscollection.org/collection/a...

An abstract painting, including large shapes in white and tan, its forms mostly defined by looping black lines and punctuated by areas of color, including pink, green, red, and yellow
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Alcalá's a really interesting painter; this is one of my favorite paintings from a gallery show of their work last spring in NYC (Their Coronation, 2023) www.marlboroughnewyork.com/exhibitions/...

A figure seen from behind in a red car, almost swallowed by a billowing blue dress
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Picture for a Saturday night: Marcel Alcalá, The Glittering Bar, 2024

A brightly colored picture of several people, attired extravagantly, in an interior spae. Three of them sit or stand around a circular table, on which are several wine glasses and a bottle. A tiled floor is below them, a mirror and windows above
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If you're interested in a more historically minded approach to connecting the Just Stop Oil protests to Van Gogh's own work, here's a relevant section from my book "Van Gogh and the End of Nature," which links our current climate crisis to Van Gogh & his era yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

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Okay, sorry- didn't mean to come off as argumentative! Am honestly just befuddled (in a good way). Will take it all under advisement...🙏

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Yes, absolutely- he took huge liberties with color, form, etc. But the distinction between the other ostensibly natural forms, rendered in much more naturalistic hues, and those red, blue, yellow ones has just piqued my curiosity

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Michael Lobel
@mlobelart.bsky.social
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: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300274363/van-g
2k followers62 following1.2k posts