Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 01/01/2025ART I LIKE #50: Jeremy Frey's baskets seen on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. Always happy when basketry or quilting or glass-blowing gets a shout-out from a major arts organization. The play with form and pattern, the care of craft! Like pots, the baskets really come alive in groups. #art 131 3
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 31/12/2024ART I LIKE #49: Peter Reginato's sculpture is sproingy & colorful while still very modern. When he paints in enamels—pouring and dripping he makes his own visual language out of bars of color, loops, lobes, and lines. I love the alternating crowded and open spaces and—wow the color pallatte! #art 110 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 30/12/2024ART I LIKE #47: Cate Simmons, Persephone's Journey. Kara Walker's not the only artist breathing life into the old silhouette form. I proposed this for the annual English Department tee shirt one year, but a colleague really put her foot down about Virginia Woolf, so we went that way instead. #art 010 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 29/12/2024ART I LIKE #46: In a film I once saw a curator ashamed to admit how much Emily Young's work won him over—carving stone was, in his opinion, old hat. Young likes the work to look old—fragments are part of the aesthetic. She also understands that stone by itself is hard to beat for beauty. #sculpture 140 4
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 28/12/2024ART I LIKE #45: Leopold Segedin, Follow the Leader. Part of a series set in west side Chicago where Segedin grew up in. The women in this image belong in their environment, either matching its colors or complimenting them. The grey-suited men are as out of place in color as in gesture. #chicagoart 100 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 27/12/2024ART I LIKE #44: Birds, Eggs & Dominoes with Pyramid, 1963. Abercrombie was known as the "queen of the bohemian artists" in midcentury Chicago & had a vocabulary of figures—cats, moons, clouds, pyramids–that she turned into landscapes charged with meaning always about to be revealed. #surrealism #art 070 7
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 26/12/2024ART I LIKE #43. Martin Ramirez doesn't get much play outside of the outsider art scene, but wow, does the work reward attention. He's obsessive about trains but what he's really great at is building up a composition out of curved lines that form ridges, tunnels, funnels of smoke. #art #outsiderart 1102 10
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 25/12/2024ART I LIKE #42 - Christmas edition. You want a nativity scene, you've got your pick of good ones. I like Fra Angelico's, partly because it has wonderful halos and glorious Byzantine gold, but it keeps the scene modest & low key. Also, it puts animals at the visual center. Why? Dunno. #art #nativity 110 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 24/12/2024ART I LIKE #41: Gustavo Perez is probably the leading ceramic artist in Mexico. His vessels bend, fold, crease & open up in surprising places, really capturing the fluid nature of clay before it's fired. All of this contrasts with the gloss and shine of flat colored glaze. Love it! #art #ceramics 082 8
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 23/12/2024ART I LIKE #40: WW1 turned Louis Monza into a pacifist & his figures shelter in little pockets of safety in a strange world. Sometimes they're trapped, too. The colors in 1968's Nightmare seem at odds with the title. But the faces in the landscape are right out of De Quincey's opium nightmares. #art 010 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 22/12/2024ART I LIKE #39: Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog has mystery & vast sublimity —but you know what's best about it? It graces the cover of a Mekons album that some of the band signed for me last night when they dropped by to pick up a Wesley Kimler collage. #artsurprise 030 3
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 21/12/2024ART I LIKE #38: I see Fred Greene Carpenter's landscapes from time to time & have a little one from his trip to the holy land. 1955's "The Valley of Hinom" takes us to a place of dark mojo in the Bible. Figures are stiff & formal, perspective flat, and that spash or sacrificial red ominous.#art 010 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 20/12/2024ART I LIKE #37: Arnold Saper, Satomi, etching 1970s. Saper loves to draw & his etchings—often self-portraits or dragonflies—usually have a loose line. Early ones like this have a more precise look. I love the contrast in values—the hair vs. all that white. I believe this shows his wife. #Canadianart 120 2
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 19/12/2024ART I LIKE #36: Remedios Varo The Juggler 1956. Varo's architecture remind me of de Chirico, except her space is alway more populated. One of her signature images is a small, confined space, often a carriage or vehicle sheltering us in a strange world. I'm sure her refugee experience plays into it. 010 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 18/12/2024ART I LIKE #35: Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2006. I can't think of a more successful public sculpture from this century. Unlike with Chicago's big Picasso, people didn't need to learn to love this: they were in from day one. First you see the city reflected, then you walk up & see yourself. #publicart 050 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 17/12/2024ART I LIKE 34: Japanese prints! What’s not to love? This one is all about the contrast between interior and the big open world. The bowl & draped cloth imply an intimate world protected & confined by those walls. And beyond? It’d like one of those European ‘world landscapes’—all possibility. #art 120 2
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 16/12/2024ART I LIKE #33. Caillebotte gets how to use those verticals to make work feel like work: a long day of scraping. He elongates one worker’s arms via forced perspective to make us feel the effort. Not a lot of color to give relief, but there’s that one tilted head: cracking wise or just yapping? #art 120 2
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 15/12/2024ART INLIKE #32. Turner, Surf, 1842. And by “1842” I mean “1842?!?” Turner was so ahead of the game in letting brushstrokes look like brushstrokes that a story does round of a dowager pointing to a blurry bit on a canvas and howling “WHAT is THAT?” & the artist replying “That, madam, is paint” #art 140 4
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 14/12/2024ART I LIKE #31: Charles Ray is a fave among 'one liner' artists... people whose work doubles down on one big idea. I recall seeing his 1993 Fire Truck outside the MCA & thinking the place was burning down. But the truck looked off... it's a blown up version of a toy. You can buy a model! #art 000 0
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 13/12/2024ART I LIKE #30. Edgy & unnerving, Kara Walker's 1994 ‘Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart' took silhouettes used for genteel 19th c. portraits & used them to show the power dynamics of race. I'll never forget it. #art 110 1
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 12/12/2024ART I LIKE #29: Pietro Liberi The Venetian Victory Over the Turks in the Dardanelli. In 1656 Venice trounced the Turks & did not want you to forget it. This vast stonker of a painting launched the "instructions to a painter" genre of poetry, huge in the 17th/18th c. and utterly forgotten today. #art 130 3
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 11/12/2024ART I LIKE #28. Autumn on the seine at argenteuil by Claude Monet (1873). I believe it was Cezanne who said "Monet is only an eye—but my God, what an eye!" And it's true—there's no deliberate intellectual program to the work, still less is there moralizing. I'm good with this. #art #impressionism 050 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 10/12/2024ART I LIKE #27: Christo Running Fence 1976. I saw the film of the making this astonishing thing when I was a kid and was astonished at how angry it made some of the locals, and gladdened when one of the ranchers through whose land it ran declared it so beautiful he slept beside it. I would too. #art 030 3
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 09/12/2024ART I LIKE #26: What I really love about painting is what I really love about calligraphy: the gesture of the brushstroke. It's like improvisation in music—something completely in-the-moment but also something that comes from years of attentive practice. Green Flow, Don Reichert 1980. #art #abex 051 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 08/12/2024ART I LIKE #25. Ann Shanks, Hide and Seek in the Coliseum, 1956. I love when the Cartier-Bresson street spontaneity of a photo also has a lot going on formally. Here it’s all in the Z axis (the line heading into the depths and out to us), the arc, and that one guy’s pivot left. Vectors! #art 051 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 07/12/2024ART I LIKE #24: Rita Cameron started as a representational painter then moved into abstraction. I always see her images as 'abstracted-from' a scene. This one, so fresh it's still in the studio, has everything I like in a good cityscape: space opening out or being blocked in by solid planes. #art 050 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 06/12/2024ART I LIKE #23: Sonia Delaunay Electric Prisms 1914. I can't think of anyone but the Robert and Sonia Delaunay who came out of Cubism as into color as angles. I can look at a painting like this for ages, the different color relations finding themselves. I see it as street lamps in mist. #art 160 6
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 05/12/2024ART I LIKE #21: Calder's 1973 Flamingo is a master class in siting art. It's in Chicago's Federal Plaza, surrounded by austere black Mies van der Rohe modernism on a featureless rectangle of space. Curves & color pop & the scale of the piece (53 feet) means it more than holds its own. #art #Chicago 040 4
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 03/12/2024ART I LIKE #19: When I was a student, Waterhouse was looked down on as academic & for his figures of wan female helplessness—but his 1888 Cleopatra is all brooding power. She sprawls on her throne, taking all the space she wants & we look up at her from below. If she said "Get out!" I'd scram. #art 120 2
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 02/12/2024ART I LIKE #18: Virginie Pernot's pottery answers the question "What would Miró have done if he were a ceramicist?" Pieces warp vessel shapes into whacko shapes that have their own harmony. In groups they come across as characters in relation to each other. You need a half dozen! #art #ceramics 0161 16
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 01/12/2024ART I LIKE #18: Leopold Segedin remains my candidate for best undiscovered artist nearing his centenarry. In Games (2015), as in many of his works, he paints himself as an old man in the Chicago of his childhood. There's community in groups, alienation is open space & always menace. #art #chicagoart 020 2
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 30/11/2024ART I LIKE #17: Toskiko Takaezu's ceramics use orb forms or what Jun Kaneko called "dango" (tall ovoid forms). They're at their best when clustered together in relationship with one another. The hammock installation at a Cranbrook show has whimsy and kind of humanizes the shapes. #art #ceramics 150 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 29/11/2024ART I LIKE #16: Vuillard, Princess Bibesco, c.1920. The soft greens and reds against that pinky-beige get toughened up with the grays and blacks of the main figure while the rectangles get softened up with draped fabrics... There are days when Edouard Vuillard is my favorite painter. #art #lesnabis 160 6
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 28/11/2024ART I LIKE #15: Look, I'm not saying the only reason to love Miró is that his paintings would make the absolute best patterns for pajamas, or that I was recently tipped off by a friend to a shop willing to print the images on silk and flannel, but... I mean, isn't that reason enough? #art #pajamas 131 3
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 27/11/2024ART I LIKE #14: Back in 2002, Jason Salavon convinced me that data visualization was going to do interesting things for art. This piece, Every Playboy Centerfold: The Decades, made statistical averages of the image sets from the 60s to the 90s. The figures get thinner and blonder. #art #digitalart 2103 10
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 26/11/2024ART I LIKE #13: I only warmed to cubism with Jacques Villon, who stuck with cubism forever: Le Potager aux Citrouille is a lithograph from 1962. His color palette gets away from Braque brown, and you see the landscapes behind the lines and planes. Takes it all back to Cezanne, eh? #art #cubism 160 6
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 25/11/2024ART I LIKE #12: Dan Anderson loved highway Americana—Route 66 and all that. Some of his vessels look like water towers or kiosks, for example. This teapot references old chimneys and like a lot of Dan's work combines iconic graphics from signage with a weathered-looking glaze. #ceramics #art 040 4
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 24/11/2024ART I LIKE #11: Marcel Dzama, 8 Strong Winds (2005). Dzama (once a student of my dad's) has a private visual language. Against blank, flat space he works up diorama-like images with lost girls, tree-people, rifles, hanged men. It's half Wes Anderson, half dark Surrealism. #Canadianart #art 180 8
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 23/11/2024ART I LIKE #10: I once walked into the MCA to review a different show but never got past Christian Quarles' paintings, where bodies distort, colors flow gently until they don't (that black!) and surfaces aren't as solid as they seem. It can get sexy but never in a straightforward way. #art #queerart 150 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 22/11/2024ART I LIKE #9: Kurt Wiser's ceramics take well-known forms (vases, jars, spheres) and well known image motifs (nature, the nude) and always do something unexpected with them. His forms morph, his images get Surreal. I like how he pairs pieces to make the sparks fly between them. #ceramics #art 151 5
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 21/11/2024ART I LIKE #8: William Baziotes, "Aquatic," 1961. Poet Joe Donahue has me thinking about tonalism—19c. landscapes with a dominant color. This is almost like a tonalist abstract painting. I like the way the shapes almost become sea critters suspended in space. A cooler, less goofy Miró. #art 030 3
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 20/11/2024ART I LIKE #7: American stained glass c.1900 is the best there ever was: mass immigration meant many new churches. Tiffany did the Protestant ones, but John La Farge did the Catholic ones just as well. His 1904 "Christ Between the Apostles" (at Boston College), is a real stunner. #stainedglass #art 171 7
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 19/11/2024ART I LIKE #6: This is the Tiffany glass ceiling of the Gran Hotel Ciudad de Mexico, but "Tiffany" is rarely Tiffany... most of the designers were women. But this was designed by the French Jacques Gruber. Is it "art"? Emphatic yes. This kind of thing is painting in light. #art #stainedglass 191 9
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 18/11/2024ART I LIKE #5: This is a new one by Wesley Kimler. I have love his shapes—like ink blots in paint. Some morph into cartoonish shapes or silhouettes. I don't know the name of this one but he sometimes gives them political titles, like Motherwell's abstract "Elegies for the Spanish Republic." #art 0133 13
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 17/11/2024ART I LIKE #4: Alfredo Arregun was a baby boomer in Mexico, and most of the people he knew in art school were making conceptual art to be modern. But he liked old Mexican icons. This piece, one of his Virgin Negra series, puts pattern by pattern like the Japanese prints he loved. #art #Mexicanart 0102 10
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 16/11/2024ART I LIKE #3: Dora Carrington's "Farm at Watendlath" (1921). Carrington's work looks naive at first—but the composition! Normally a horizon line that high feels confining, but here? The mother and child seem protected by maternal hills that also seem to beckon them. #Bloomsburygroup #art 0141 14
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 15/11/2024ART I LIKE #2: Spanish Impressionists don't get much much love, but Dario de Regoyos is good! "Good Friday in Castille" (1904) puts black against bright, crosses axes of train and procession dynamically in space, and says something about the old world and the new crossing paths. #spanishart #art 0182 18
Robert Archambeau @robertarchambeau.bsky.social · 14/11/2024ART I LIKE #1: Phillip Sutton "Samoa," c.1967. Sutton's English, but unlike many English painters of his generation he went in for bright colors. His south Pacific prints really pop, with shapes that invoke both birds and vegetation. They remind me of Matisse's cut outs. #art #britishart 0163 16
