More 1993

Yesterday I posted the 1993 NYTimes Magazine Art World All-Stars cover. I've also been looking at an old Art in America Jerry Saltz article called A Year in the Life:Tropic of Painting. The article is included in the October 1994 issue but is a study of painting shown in NYC over the course of the 1993/1994 season.

Lots and lots of photos and names and observations and it's fun to look back at in retrospect. He's divided the work into eleven categories - some with subsections - that I will list here along with the artists included, links, and interesting tidbits. You can read the whole article here.

Category I. The Big Cats

"it's important to remember how new the work of these artists once looked and how very little painting today carries that kind of newness"

Gerhard Richter
Francesco Clemente
Enzo Cucchi - "seemed lost in repetition and ersatz paganism"
Sandro Chia - "was shooting blanks. He seems mired in a sappy, vaguely neo-hedonistic realism"
Julian Schnabel
David Salle
Kenny Scharf
George Condo
Markus Lupertz

Category II. The Museum Cats

"three big names and a sleeper"

Lucien Freud
Robert Ryman
Roy Lichtenstein
Vija Celmins

Category III. Keeping On With Distinction

"all over town, quite a few artists - mostly over 50 - went on with the business of making paintings"

Frances Barth - nice site!
Jennifer Bartlett
Lynda Benglis
Bill Jensen
Ellen Phelan
Per Kirkeby
Louise Fishman
John Moore
James Bishop
Martha Diamond
Robert Kushner
Sidney Tillim
Jack Whitten
Robert Zakanitch
William T. Wiley
Konrad Klapheck - "come(s) on like a burst of fresh air"
Elizabeth Murray
Mary Heilman - go to the artists page
Robert Mangold
Chuck Close
Alex Katz

Category IV. Our Bodies, Our Selves, You Asshole

Patricia Cronin
Nicola Tyson
Lisa Yuskavage - "kitschy colored portraits of very young girls who have grossly distorted female bodies. She's a good painter but her color - hyperintense pastel shades - is better than her drawing, which is fairly unremarkable"
Nicole Eisenman - "is over-the-top and out-of-control in a positive way. She's one of the looser cannons around, right now"
Mira Schor
Suzanne McClelland
Lari Pittman
Julian Trigo
Rita Ackermann - "her work has a real "look" to it and a complicated emotional temperature that could lift it above its trendiness"
Marlene Dumas - "the flat-footed ways they're painted leave me completely cold"

Category V. Toon Time

"this may be one of the most vital areas of contemporary painting"

Peter Saul
Phillip Smith
Carl Ostendarp
Chuck Agro and here
Christian Schumann - "(his show) was one of the best of the season" - "There's a raw energy and an undermining sense of humor to Schumann's work. He's a natural; there's nothing forced about his work"
Amy Sillman - "her influences are keeping her a notch or two away from something new"
Thomas Trosch - "there is a quaint loveliness to Trosch's work, even if his images aren't that memorable"
Katie Merz
Lily van der Stokker

Ugh. This has just become a really long list. Maybe I should go back and delete everything except for the categories and the artist's I've included a quote for? But I wanted to be able to look up and link to some of these artists.

Okay, I'll just stop here with the first half. Maybe I'll do the rest tomorrow.

UPDATE: THE REST OF THE LIST!!