Postcards to Oxford: Hello from the galleries of Europe

July 04, 2012

Lucas Carpenter, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English at Oxford College, spent recent time on assignment for Art Papers.  This publication of the non-profit organization of the same name, examines art and culture in the world today.  Art Papers creates "an independent and accessible forum for the exchange of perspectives on the role of contemporary art as a socially relevant and engaged discourse." 

Carpenter spent time in Paris and Zurich, where he reviewed several major art exhibitions.  Here is his description of the trip:

Just back from Paris and Switzerland. In Paris I reviewed a major show by abstract expressionist Christopher Wool at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris for Art Papers. He's scheduled for a major retrospective at the Guggenheim next year. As a freelance art critic I'm also writing about the R. Crumb retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris and the Gerhardt Richter exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. In Zurich I did some on-site research on the Dada painters and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire, where the movement started. The bar there still serves a dozen different types of absinthe. I'll be using that research in an article about the neo-dada movement in the '50s and '60s centered in New York.