California Literary Review

John Dubrow’s Handsome Urban Motifs: Since his first New York exhibition in 1985, John Dubrow has created some of the finest paintings of his generation. The commanding suite of aerial cityscapes born of his 1997-98 residency in the World Trade Center towers comes straight to mind. So do his views of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and sun-drenched roofscapes of New York. Certain portraits from the beginning of the decade — Frederick Wiseman among his film cans; the model Josie — are memorable works of art that surpass the fugitive occasion of their making. [NY Sun]

Clash of the Titans: Active from the late 1930s through the 1970s, Greenberg and Rosenberg served as champions of what came to be known as Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting (how there came to be two names for the same movement is part of the story). Greenberg and Rosenberg worked in the New York art world and wrote about many of the same artists, but their approaches were different, escalating into what became a legendary personal rivalry. [nextbook]

Nature Conquers Micropolis in Dioramas Photographed to Look Real: Blockbuster special effects a lá Day After Tomorrow are awesome — even that silly ice-encased Statue of Liberty — but you don’t need $100 million to plausibly depict post-apocalyptic ruin. Case in point: the unsettling dioramas photographer Lori Nix constructs out of materials like wood, buckwheat flour, insulation foam, and acrylic gel. In her series The City, she imagines abandoned municipal settings where nature is taking its ineluctable revenge. [Wired]

Andrade gave soul to Op Art: The Optical Art movement – Op Art for short – didn’t last more than a few years during the 1960s, and involved a relative handful of painters. Edna Andrade, who carried the Op banner in Philadelphia, lasted much longer, three months into her 92d year. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Medium Cool: A show of small, tidy canvases at the punctiliously hip New Museum designates Tomma Abts, the Turner Prize-winning German-English painter, who is forty years old, as the doyenne of a sudden fashion for good old abstract painting in newfangled guises. She’s pretty cool. Her one-of-a-kind (though all of a type) compositions deploy serpentines, polygons, rays, and other generic forms in schemes of astringent color: worried red, disgruntled gray-green, caffeinated peach. [New Yorker]

Miami Art Machine: Can a free (and rather free-form) art school make the art world think of Miami as more than its playground? [NY Mag]