Simplicity and Imagination

(New York Academy of Art)

By ROBERT EDWARD BULLOCK, Special to the Sun | November 14, 2013

In nature, it is said that every action is balanced by an opposite and equal reaction. The art world is not bound to this law of physics but nonetheless displays a similar pattern in how modern art movements react to each other.

Turning away from her Abstract Expressionist training in the late 1960s, Martha Erlebacher went on to become a master of representational painting and brought to it a freshness and humor that is really pretty wonderful. In over 30 works, ranging from imaginative still life compositions to metaphor-loaded representations of the human form, the New York Academy of Art's current retrospective explores and celebrates the career of this renowned and talented painter who passed away earlier this year.

The dozen or so still-life compositions on display are amazing in their simplicity and imagination.

(read the full review at The New York Sun.)

Danish Surprise

(Scandinavian House, New York City)

By ROBERT EDWARD BULLOCK, Special to the Sun | November 9, 2013

The metamorphoses that swept European painting in the 19th century were dramatic, often abrupt, and stylistically further apart than their dates would suggest. In "Danish Painting from the Golden Age to the Modern Breakthrough," on display at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, 37 masterworks from the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the early 20th century offer up beautiful works along with some surprises.

Two works at the start hint at the breadth and the continuity of the works exhibited. J. Th. Lundbye's "Landscape Near Lake Arresø," 1838, is a 19th-century idyll, the freshness and simplicity of its warm green and pearl gray-blue palette lending a charming sense of air and light to the scene. In fluid daubs, shadows among the stands of trees indicate the direction of the light as a low rise in the land leads to the gauzy distant tones, little clouds jutting across the sky to the horizon.

(read the full review at The New York Sun.)