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Holland Cotter

Articles written by the author

Entertainment
9 Aug 2024
PARIS — To judge by the marketing hullabaloo, the Leonardo da Vinci retrospective that opens here Thursday at the Louvre should be the visual equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a trumpet-and-trombone choir. Blockbuster’s plastered all over it, and rightly so. Timed-ticket sales for its one-stop run are moving right along.
Leonardo, Hand and Mind, Shines at the Louvre
Entertainment
6 Aug 2024
ATLANTA — If you had visited Atlanta in the early 1960s, you would have found drinking fountains labeled “Colored” and “White.” Driving into the city from the airport today you pass signs for Ralph David Abernathy Freeway, Andrew Young International Boulevard, John Lewis Freedom Parkway. As in the country at large, there have been big changes.
Civil War Artwork Circles Back on a Complex History
Entertainment
5 Aug 2024
NEW YORK — Outsider Art, which once had fringe cachet, is now pretty well inside the mainstream fold. As a genre, it has developed branding strategies, a collecting base and a marketable canon of (mostly male) stars, with Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez and Bill Traylor leading the list. All three are present, like tutelary deities, in the 27th New York City edition of the show, at the Metropolitan Pavilion.
Entertainment
12 Jul 2019
(Critic's Pick): NEW YORK — The 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci will bring big doings to Paris this fall with the largest-ever and one-stop-only career survey at the Louvre. And New York gets a shot of buzz in advance with the opening at the Met on Monday of a single-painting show of one of the most rawly emotional images in the Leonardo canon.
What Leonardo da Vinci Couldn't Finish
Entertainment
21 Jun 2019
(Critic’s Notebook): NEW YORK — The exhibition “Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019” is a golden anniversary survey of wonderful art from the collection of a New York museum that is in the process of being torn apart.
The Fraught Question of Roots
Entertainment
10 May 2019
(Critic’s Notebook): For generations Americans tended to see art museums as alternatives to crass everyday life. Like libraries, they were for learning; like churches, for reflection. You went to them for a hit of Beauty and a lesson in “eternal values,” embodied in relics of the past donated by civic-minded angels.
When Art, Money and Ethics Collide
Entertainment
3 May 2019
“This moment has caught me being as much a citizen as an artist,” said the sculptor Martin Puryear on an afternoon in his studio in New York’s Hudson River Valley early in April. In two days he would leave for Venice to begin installing a solo exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale in which he will officially represent the United States.
Martin Puryear, citizen-sculptor