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Roberta Smith

Articles written by the author

10 Aug 2024
Robert Ryman, one of the most important American artists to emerge after World War II, a minimalist who achieved a startling non-minimalist variety in his paintings even though they were mostly white and usually square, died Friday at his home in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. He was 88.
10 Aug 2024
NEW YORK — Jamaican visionary John Dunkley (1891-1947) is the latest artist to decimate the distinctions between self-taught and trained, outsider and insider and folk and not folk. The first large museum survey in the United States devoted to the work of this gifted autodidact is now at the American Folk Art Museum, after originating at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2017, with Diana Nawi, now an independent curator, heading the organizing team.
1 Aug 2024
NEW YORK — When it comes to postwar art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art rarely lets you breathe easy for long. Just when it hits a good phase, it suddenly changes course and more than likely shoots itself in the foot. Things were really looking up at the Met Breuer, with its superbly installed recent exhibition of Jack Whitten’s sculpture. Then the Met suddenly pulled out of the last three years of its eight-year lease there. It cut short a project that was producing results, giving the Met’s...
5 May 2019
Ben Heller, an influential New York art collector and dealer best known for his early embrace of abstract expressionism and the sale of one of its masterworks to an Australian museum, which caused an international furor, died April 24 in Sharon, Connecticut. He was 93.
Ben Heller, Powerhouse Collector of Abstract Art, Dies at 93