Douglas Dreishpoon
Douglas Dreishpoon is director of the Helen Frankenthaler catalogue raisonné project, chief curator emeritus at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York, and consulting editor at the Brooklyn Rail. Current books include Modern Sculpture: Artists in Their Own Words (University of California Press) and Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988–2009 (Radius Books), both 2022.
In Conversation
KEN PRICE with Douglas Dreishpoon
Price’s unconventional sculpture captivated my imagination more than twenty years ago when I saw it in New York at the Willard Gallery on East 72nd Street: a tiny forest of finely sliced and brashly painted amorphic mounds, so outrageous and yet so right.
In Conversation
Michael Brenson with Douglas Dreishpoon
Michael Brenson’s biography on David Smith, more than twenty years in the making and exceeding eight hundred pages, now stands as the definitive portrait of this American sculptor. There were times when close friends feared that the book would remain unfinished because its subject was just too daunting. But its author persisted—a Herculean undertaking requiring endless hours of research, extensive interviews, and an informed sculptural imagination. The fruits of his inquiry shine as a biography honoring the breadth and complexity of Smith's life and art.
Creativity, Commerce, and the Elephant that Lingers in the Room
By Douglas DreishpoonThe lure of lucre means different things to different people, depending on who you are and who you aspire to be. When business and big money brand so many vectors of the cultural landscape, it’s refreshing to see market-elevated icons like Andy Warhol and Vincent van Gogh handled, as they are in Donna De Salvo’s Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Julian Schnabel’s new film, At Eternity’s Gate, in ways that restore their humanity by focusing on the art—where, how, and when it got made.
Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town
By Douglas DreishpoonMany archival gems are featured in Back in Town, the homecoming exhibition organized by Robert Scalise and Jason Andrew at the University of Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery.
Tobi Kahn: Formation: Images of the Body
By Douglas DreishpoonKahn has painted in the fertile gap between representation and abstraction for more than forty years: landscapes, seascapes, flowers, cells, and human bodies distilled into evocative images. An ethos unites Kahn with kindred modernists—Hilma af Klint, Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, Arthur Dove and Albert Pinkham Ryder, Rothko and Barnett Newman—who courted ambiguity as a pictorial language of equivalence.
