Episode No. 21 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Lari Pittman and print-maker Kathan Brown.
One of Pittman’s most important paintings, The Veneer of Order (1985) is featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago exhibition “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.” The thesis of the exhibition, which was curated by Helen Molesworth, is that the political, often confrontational art of the 1980s had its roots in feminist art of the preceding decade. Pittman’s painting, and indeed his oeuvre, is a clear example of how feminist discourse and art motivated art in and after the ’80s. [Aside: The Yale University Press-published catalogue for the show is fantastic — and it’s 40% off here.]
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized a mid-career survey of Pittman’s work in 1996. The show, which was curated by Howard Fox, traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Last year Rizzoli published a gorgeous monograph on Pittman’s work. An exhibition of his newest paintings opens next month at Berlin’s Gerhardsen Gerner gallery.
On the second segment, Crown Point Press founder Kathan Brown talks about Richard Diebenkorn’s printmaking practice. Many of Diebenkorn’s Crown Point-published prints are on view in “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,” which is on view now at the Orange County Museum of Art. Host Tyler Green reviewed the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s presentation of the exhibition here.
Air date: March 29, 2012.

Lari Pittman, The Veneer of Order, 1985. Collection of The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, Calif.