Barry Schwabsky

The retort​ was cutting. Albert C. Barnes, the Philadelphia art collector who by the time of his death in 1951 owned 181 paintings by Auguste Renoir, was trying to one-up Duncan Phillips, who had recently spent the then considerable sum of $125,000 on Luncheon of the Boating Party – widely considered one of Renoir’s greatest works (and still the highlight of the Phillips...

Could​ anything be more unexpected, in the world of art criticism, than the appearance of a book by Rosalind Krauss on Willem de Kooning? Krauss is a wide-ranging critic and historian of modernism, the author of an influential book on Picasso, but she has been associated above all with minimalist and post-minimalist sculptors of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as...

Luc Tuymans’s painting Altar (2002) depicts a wedding chapel in a Mormon temple. It’s a space that only church members are allowed to enter, so – as Ralph Rugoff recounts in the catalogue to the retrospective of the Belgian painter’s work at Bozar, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (until 8 May) – Tuymans based the painting on a photograph taken by a...

Frank Stella once complained about what he saw as a kind of timidity in Italian painting before Leonardo, something ‘in the acceptance of commissioned configurations, in the attitude towards covering a given surface that held painting back … Artists before Leonardo accepted the given surface and made the best of it.’ Today, it seems to me, artists who make installations...