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A traveling exhibition organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum puts the artist back in the spotlight

Some of the most significant sculptures of the twentieth century were made by painters. Works by Picasso, Matisse, David Smith, and Ellsworth Kelly are well recognized examples. After seeing the big show of George Segal’s work at Rutgers, I felt that he belongs in this category of painter-sculptors.

“ROTHKO IS A WATERCOLORIST.” The typewritten note in Clyfford Still’s unpublished diary, undated but recorded no earlier than 1961, appears as if graven into a largely blank page.1 It is clearly meant as a condemnation: Still had long come to despise his former close friend. No explanation follows, and the painter doubtless believed none was necessary. What other epithet, after all, could more concisely telegraph all that separated them—Still, with his vigorous, knife-sculpted impasto and flame-like forms, and Rothko, with his translucent layers and liquid shapes? 

A. S.: Where were you born? L. S.: I was born in a small town built on a hill, surrounded on three sides by a lake, in Macedonia, Greece, and…

Seventy years on from the 20th century’s most studied and celebrated art movement, what could possibly be “discovered” anew about AbEx? Janet Sobel.