Fine Art Registry® Columnist/Guest Author
Joan Altabe
- Art & Architecture Critic
Joan Altabe is an award-winning art and architecture critic, currently writing for the "Bradenton Herald," a Knight-Ridder newspaper on the west coast of Florida. She is referenced in "Who’s Who in American Art."
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Article List
Have you heard this one? It almost sounds like a joke. The chalk drawings of a Florida figure artist were taken from view in a county library because they showed bared breasts too near the...
Read MoreArt Article, March 31, 2008
The Boston Globe reports a Chicago attorney’s reaction to a Roy Lichtenstein exhibition of his signature blow-ups of newspaper comics. Mark Weissburg said he was surprised that the Pop artist had...
Read MoreArt Article, March 1, 2008
An art show was cancelled recently on account of the character of the artist. Richard L. Pattenaude, president of the University of Southern Maine, cancelled the display of paintings by a prison...
Read MoreArt Article, February 20, 2008
Why don’t we just come out and call contemporary art what it is – a recycling. Painters and sculptors have been replicating themselves and each other for some years now. Its called post-modernism...
Read MoreArt Article, December 31, 2007
Stolen Art: Close to 700,000 art objects that were illegally excavated and exported out of Italy have been recovered. Some say that looted treasure approaches four times that number. But no one k...
Read MoreArt Article, December 12, 2007
Conflicts are a natural state of affairs. But some loose-lipped conservators in Holland have abused the privilege. In the spring of 1986, unknown Dutch realist Gerard Jan van Bladeren, armed with...
Read MoreArt Article, November 7, 2007
This is about art that apes an established style but violates the content of the real thing. There ought to be a law. Andre Breton, founder of Surrealism, likened the style to firing a pistol blindly...
Read MoreArt Article, October 12, 2007
Two lessons in one here: the value of persistence, and painting abstractions that don’t lose touch with reality. Willem de Kooning, an illegal immigrant who became a leader of America’s modern ar...
Read MoreArt Article, October 5, 2007
Art scholars and museum officials have been bumping heads over Degas bronzes traveling the museum circuit. Scholars say the bronzes are not by Degas, but merely reproductions...
Read MoreArt Article, September 28, 2007
Have you ever seen Swiss painter Hermann Alfred Sigg’s dark, abstract landscapes? They appear in your eyes like a still night. His renditions of land and sea slow the rush of time better than...
Read MoreArt Article, September 28, 2007
The watchtowers of art history must let their heads drop against the steering wheel sometimes. How else to explain the factual errors in the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art – the touted...
Read MoreArt Article, September 14, 2007
When you think of American photographers in history who made a difference, the names of Ansel Adams or Robert Mapplethorpe may come to mind. But the first American to spur change by...
Read MoreArt Article, September 7, 2007
Back in ’98 when the advertising crowd put Whistler’s mother to work urging seniors to get on the Internet was when I began to worry. The celebrated portrait by James Abbott McNeill Whistler...
Read MoreArt Article, August 31, 2007
From time to time, I’m asked to name the best artist in the state where I write art criticism — Florida — and I’m usually without a ready reply. But a show I saw the other day supplied an...
Read MoreArt Article, August 24, 2007
If you don’t know them, you can get them wrong. If you haven’t lived them, you’re liable to render only their moods of impermanence and grimy blackness, their pasty light, their anemic color and...
Read MoreArt Article, August 13, 2007
Is it possible that unhappy artists do better work? History seems to say so. Consider some Old Master malcontents: The monk Fra Fillipo Lippi painted sacred images with a worshipful grace but...
Read MoreArt Article, August 7, 2007
A critic isn’t an artist’s favorite person. I get that. But this one isn’t their enemy, either. Today, I defend them against doctors. Case in pointlessness: Writing in this year’s Archives of...
Read MoreArt Article, August 1, 2007
I’m tired of hearing people say that artists are out of their heads. How about you? Consider the artist most famous for being insane, Vincent Van Gogh. Remember Kirk Douglas’ raving-lunatic...
Read MoreArt Article, July 20, 2007
Blame it on Freud. He loaded everything down with subtext. One look at Picasso’s Guernica – at the women, children and animals with heads flung back, eyes rolled back, mouths open in howls as bombs fall on their town...
Read MoreArt Article, July 15, 2007
You have to stop expecting me to see things the way you do. The ’50s film Rashomon – a tale of rape and murder through flashbacks of four witnesses, none of whom saw it the same way – is a demo...
Read MoreArt Article, July 10, 2007
The "experts" don’t always get it right. Consider the case of chemist Walter C. McCrone, a leading expert on art forgeries. In 1978, McCrone dated the Shroud of Turin – thought to be the burial...
Read MoreArt Article, June 26, 2007
The story of art forgery is as old as the Seven Hills of Rome. Michelangelo sculpted a Cupid, buried it in a Roman garden for that dug-up antiquity look and sold it for an inflated price. Why...
Read MoreArt Article, June 1, 2007
This piece of history is enough to push your bottom lip forward. In 1514, when Persia was under siege from the Turks, the Shah Ishmael secreted away his favorite painter before going into battle...
Read MoreArt Article, May 17, 2007
Anyone know Clyde Butcher’s photographs? No? OK, think Ansel Adams. Butcher is Florida’s Ansel Adams. I bring these two lens artists up because both work without color. And not only is the...
Read MoreArt Article, May 7, 2007
Rather than rail at you this time out, consider this column a motivational chat exhorting you to keep on no matter who’s carping at your work, me included. When Henri Matisse left his law studies...
Read MoreArt Article, May 1, 2007
If the art commonly seen these days is the sum of what artists are doing, I’m worried and you should be, too. Where are the Social Realists? Granted, the movement arose in the ‘30s, during...
Read MoreArt Article, April 27, 2007
Conceptual art isn’t art. It’s an idea, often without image or object. Hans Haack conducted a poll on museum goers’ opinion of the Vietnam War. See? No art. You may as well write out the idea...
Read MoreArt Article, March 27, 2007
Despite their long and varied history, still lifes don’t get enough respect. If you’re a painter of inanimate objects, this one’s for you. Probably the best time to paint commonplace items was...
Read MoreArt Article, March 20, 2007
Let’s get the bad out of the way. If you want to see really bad portrait painting, check out the likenesses by the Dutch in the 17th century. Most noticeable is their lack of imagination...
Read MoreArt Article, January 31, 2007
Because FAR® is a website teeming with art makers and art lovers, it’s reasonable to ask what this thing is that we make and love. I get asked this question a lot. My answer starts with what...
Read MoreArt Article, January 18, 2007
Researchers in Sweden say they’ve discovered that viewing and discussing art eases constipation. No joke. A recent Utne Reader reports that a group of 20 elderly art lovers who met once a week...
Read MoreArt Article, January 15, 2007
You know those "Best" lists? They crop up every year - itemizations like Random House’s "100 Best English Language Novels" and the American Film Institute’s top 100 "Greatest Movies of All Time...
Read MoreArt Article, December 29, 2006
Marketable art these days seems to come in three categories: sofa art, also known as furniture store art (the kind that accessorizes living rooms), tourist art (the kind hawked in resort towns...
Read MoreArt Article, December 29, 2006
Shaped canvases, the kind that Frank Stella is famed for, where are they? You’d think that 21st century art, known for liberating art from confining canons, would have more shaped canvases to...
Read MoreArt Article, December 29, 2006
Artists should be required to read the comic strip "For Better or For Worse." While Fine Art regurgitates styles, cartoonist Lynn Johnston moves people the way Rembrandt did with his "Girl...
Read MoreArt Article, November 27, 2006
As a newspaper critic, I don’t answer reader complaints when they’re written for "Letters to the Editor." After all, they’re not sent to me. Besides, everyone’s entitled to sound off. I hold off...
Read MoreArt Article, November 19, 2006
In case you think of art critics having the confidence level of Great Whites, this is me chewing over an area of concern: Shock art, my tag for exhibits that can make you stagger back, chilled at...
Read MoreArt Article, October 30, 2006
Attention computer artists. You may need seat belts for this one. It’s liable to be a bumpy ride. I’m one of those critics with a blind spot for computer art. In the beginning, electronic...
Read MoreArt Article, October 23, 2006
Do critics ever change their minds? Should they? Art News magazine ran a story in the ‘90s about critics who do an about-face, suggesting that those who don’t aren’t facing up to a fact of lif...
Read MoreArt Article, October 19, 2006
If your style is Pop art, reset your relays. Pop art is a dagger writhing under fine art’s work-shirt, striking like a serpent – invisibly. Pop was OK in the ’60s, when it burst onto the art...
Read MoreArt Article, October 12, 2006
There’s no such thing as the right style. The ongoing argument between Abstract art and realism prompts this letter to you today. The argument started over one hundred years ago in a Victorian...
Read MoreArt Article, October 5, 2006
You might call this cautionary tale “How Not To Talk To An Art Critic.” About a decade ago, I was interviewing the poet Allen Ginsberg and was quickly turned off by his conversation. No, it...
Read MoreArt Article, October 1, 2006
Are you good at it? Do you describe the Great Outdoors in ways that invite others to feel it? Maybe because it’s so hot in my Florida location that "The Hunters in the Snow" by 16th-centur...
Read MoreArt Article, September 11, 2006
There are too many Edna Hibels in the world. Here’s hoping you’re not one of them. Edna Hibel is a merchandising package, a bad painter with her own museum (Jupiter, FL) and her own
...
Read MoreArt Article, August 26, 2006
Check your press releases for hype, please. To this critic, at least, it’s just gray scud on the page. Exhibit literature for an artist in a Florida gallery – we’ll call him John Smith - is a...
Read MoreArt Article, August 11, 2006
The popularity of Dan Brown’s thoroughly panned The Da Vinci Code and the equally berated movie suggests that critics may be the new dinosaurs – on the way to extinction.
...
Read MoreArt Article, August 1, 2006
A crime against the art world is going unnoticed. There are no guns implicated. No slam-slam of bullets can be heard. But as far as I’m concerned, those involved are crooks....
Read MoreArt Article, July 25, 2006
There are a lot of hacks in the art world. If you’re one, find another line of work. You’re killing us. Let’s define terms. I’m not talking about pictures of pussycats with yarn balls that fill s...
Read MoreArt Article, July 15, 2006
If you’re a woman artist and participate in woman art shows, this message may hit like a wild wind blowing litter in your face: gender-specific...
Read MoreArt Article, June 30, 2006
Nudes. There are good ones and those of the second kind. Pretty pictures with nothing to say - the second kind - look so practiced, so...
Read MoreArt Article, June 15, 2006
If I were one of the French Impressionists of the 19th century, I’d be indignant. They were rule-breakers. They revolted...
Read MoreArt Article, May 31, 2006
I’m an art critic by trade – that dreaded breed known for dissing and dicing and otherwise turning your self-esteem precarious. So you’re going...
Read MoreArt Article, April 25, 2006
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