DAILY PIC: Cindy Sherman hit her stride as an artist amazingly early. Her trademark self-portrait photos – including this hand-painted series where she mimics orgasm – had already started to appear while she was in her junior year in art at Buffalo State college. A new catalog, published by Vienna’s Verbund collection, presents everything Sherman made between 1975 and 1977, when she moved to New York and began work on her “Untitled Film Stills”. (A slide show in the Daily Beast presents a selection of works from the book.) One issue  I’m still not clear on: Just how much of Sherman’s art depends on the influence of Suzy Lake, the pioneering Canadian feminist who was working with self-portrayal before Sherman was. Lake had published very Shermanesque work by early 1974, well before Sherman discovered herself as her subject. On the other hand, the new catalog explains that the two didn’t meet until Lake showed up to give a talk in Buffalo in October 1975, after Sherman’s first self-portraits. Sherman has always acknowledged the contact, so maybe the whole issue of precedence is a dead letter. After all, it was Sherman who took the idea and pushed it deep into our culture.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the  Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC: L&M Arts, on New York’s Upper East Side, is showing a stunning selection of Frank Stella’s early, and massively influential, abstractions – including these copper-toned works. What impresses me most is how impossible it is to choose between reading Stella’s paintings for their perceptual effects (how they explore the beauty of lines and shapes and surfaces) and their conceptual rigor (how they follow simple rules dictated by the shape and size of Stella’s stretcher and brush). He’s the art historical hinge between sensual abstract expressionism and brainy minimal art – tendencies that normally exclude each other.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the  Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.

DAILY PIC:  We may be well past the turn of the century, but it still feels a fine moment for fin-de-siècle decadence – and so for the show called “A Rebours” that launches the new gallery  Venus Over Manhattan, on New York’s Upper East Side. The show’s title copies the name of the great decadent novel published by Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1884, in which a fading aristocrat  explores the far shores of aesthetic pleasure.

Adam Lindemann, the New York investor, author and collector who founded the new gallery, says that this first show is “broadly inspired” by Huysman’s project, and by the “decadence of the current art world.”

Two spiky candlesticks by the French artist César greet you as you come in, and help brighten a room otherwise lit only by spots. There’s a bizarre, overheated piece of neurasthenic medievalism painted by Gustave Moreau around 1885, and a painting from 2000 by the Englishman Glenn Brown: it could easily pass for the decaying portrait in Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Gray”.

For more details on the show see the longer version of this post at TheDailyBeast.com/Daily-Pic.

Maybe my favorite work in the show is Gary Bachman’s (unphotogenic) “One Pound Prop”, from 1986. It is a little  house-of-cards cube whose four sides are lead plates, three inches by three, that each weigh one quarter pound. And of course the whole thing’s a knock-off and take-down of Richard Serra’s macho “One Ton Prop,” which was the same piece, made the same year, only chest-high and 2,000 times heavier. And here’s a nice detail: Bachman’s object exists in an edition of 2,000, so the total heft of his work matches Serra’s.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the  Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.