James Meyer at Artforum:
The artist’s astounding success was by no means predictable when he started out. History painting, the highest of the classical painterly genres as defined by the Royal Academy’s founders, was a distant memory by the 1980s, when the revival of figurative painting and tired Expressionist formulas on both sides of the Atlantic inspired the passionate critiques of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and his October compatriots. In his well-argued catalogue essay, Godfrey reckons with his own earlier skepticism of figuration, including Marshall’s. As he describes, a visit to the painter’s Chicago studio in 2012 instigated a process of internal interrogation. He came to believe that history painting—if refreshed by new techniques—would speak more directly to audiences, including viewers not typically drawn to museums, than the conceptualist formulas of a prior generation, embracing a position he ascribes to Marshall himself: “As [Marshall] knew, figurative paintings in museums attracted a large audience of experts, first-timers, tourists and schoolchildren, far broader than the niche audience for the lens- and text-based artworks I revered then.” The crowds of teenagers and children listening raptly to the lectures of identical-looking docents in the back-to-back galleries in Untitled (Underpainting), 2018, imagine an art world infinitely more inclusive than the one Marshall entered as a young artist.
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JOHN MARTIN NEVER smoked cigarettes. He did not use drugs or drink alcohol. Martin’s vice was book collecting, which he began in earnest in the late 1930s after he dropped out of UCLA. His enrollment was brief: he left when he discovered that his favorite modern authors, such as Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wallace Stevens, were not on the curriculum.
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If you read a book
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