Meyer Schapiro News Today

Fifty eight years after Delmore Schwartz’s heart attack in the hallway of a hotel off Broadway in midtown Manhattan, readers have access to almost the full spectrum of his poetry, a gift to anyone who cares about twentieth century verse in English.

IMPRESSIONISM BEGAN IN REVOLT. Against the restrictive system of artistic training, the group embraced art-school dropouts. Against biased selection committees, they opened their ranks to all. Against hierarchical display conventions, they assigned wall space by lots. And so, in December 1873, they formed a société anonyme, a joint stock company. The artists based its charter on that of a bakers’ union and pledged to finance “the organization of free exhibitions, without a jury or honorifi...

From the archives: Michael Fried on Manet

As I think of the successes and failures of artists’ legacies, I’ve learned different stories tell different life’s circumstances, depending on luck and persistent efforts on the behalf of those who are dedicating their lives to perpetually keeping the artists’ works alive and contextually relevant in the former, while in the latter what requires of the artists’ caretakers, be it members of their families, friends or colleagues there my lack of clarity of intentions or s...

Figurative and intensely personal, Frida Kahlo’s paintings fuse folklore and symbolism to illustrate her lived experience.

“MANET/DEGAS,” the fall blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins with an unabashed, double-barreled bang: Édouard Manet’s last great self-portrait, paired up alongside one of Edgar Degas’s first. The juxtaposition provides a thrilling object lesson in the stolid compare-and-contrast curatorial methodology that defines the exhibition, but if it’s meant to show the two artists on an equal footing, it doesn’t stage a fair fight.

James Panero on “Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Karen Wilkin on “Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting,” at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth.

The retrospective exhibition of Robert Motherwell’s paintings currently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is exhilarating. I came away with the sense that he has lived in totality, and that an infinite reservoir of awareness is in service for him at the moment of creation.

Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip” is a group biography of six visual artists and the work they created on the edge of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.