Sometimes Good Art Jumps Out

After 1909, Monet Drastically Enlarged His Brushstrokes, Disintegrated His Images, And Broke Through The Taming Constraints And Delicacy Of Impressionism For Good. Nineteen Gnarly Paintings, Starting In 1909 And Carrying Through His Final Seventeen Years, Finish Off The Notion That Monet Went Happily Ever After Into Lily-land.

John Currin's Exaggerated Realism And His Twisted Women Kept Me Off Balance, Never Knowing If They Were Sincere Or Ironic Or Some New Emotion.

Mark Grotjahn's Large New Paintings Abound With Torrents Of Ropy Impasto, Laid Down In Thickets, Cascading Waves, And Bundles That Swell, Braid Around, Or Overlap One Another.

Nearly A Half-century On From Feminism, Simply Being A Woman Artist Is Still A Revolutionary Act. And Getting One's Work Shown Continues To Be Met By Enormous Inbuilt Resistance.

Imagine It's 1981. You're An Artist, In Love With Art, Smitten With Art History. You're Also A Woman, With Almost No Mentors To Look To; Art History Just Isn't That Into You. Any Woman Approaching Art History In The Early Eighties Was Attempting To Enter An Almost Foreign Country, A Restricted And Exclusionary Domain That Spoke A Private Language.