Within the late Nineteen Fifties, a Manhattan-born faculty scholar was operating from an artwork historical past course at Barnard to a George Balanchine ballet observe on the storied College of American Ballet on 82nd Road and Broadway. Quickly, she started to make connections between the old-school Russian ballet instructors who taught her “ferocious point class” and had been continually “aspiring to an abstract ideal,” if a ruthless one, and the extending strains of Anthony Caro’s sculptures striving towards an arabesque. These rigorous research in dance knowledgeable the work of the main critic and curator of Twentieth-century Modernism, Karen Wilkin.
Left to proper: Helen Frankenthaler, Karen Wilkin, and Rona Conti on the 1983 Triangle Workshop in Pine Plains, New York (picture courtesy Triangle Arts Alliance)
After all, Balanchine’s presence was only one occasion wherein Wilkin has brushed shoulders with masters of the humanities all through her lifetime. On this episode, she discusses the affect of her mother and father’ shut friendships with New York’s distinguished literary figures, from S.J. Perelman to Ruth McKenney, and artists like Adolph Gottlieb. She tells us about touring the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA) with Kenneth Noland, advising on the Triangle residency alongside Helen Frankenthaler, and attending the Spoleto Competition as composer Samuel Barber’s “beard.” Wilkin additionally displays on the precious classes she discovered from years working with the legendary critic Clement Greenberg, although she doesn’t draw back from illuminating his noxious mistreatment of girls like herself. The writer of monographs on a litany of those artists from Stuart Davis and David Smith to Georges Braque and Giorgio Morandi, she discusses her journey in artwork writing with Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian who as soon as was her scholar on the College of Toronto and credit her together with his introduction to the world of artwork criticism. Tune in to listen to them focus on all the things from the decline of MoMA to masters of Canadian abstraction to Wilkin’s beloved herd of Maine Coon cats.
Hrag Vartanian and Karen Wilkin in Manhattan (picture by Hrag Vartanian)
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