Every story about artists and bars eventually needs a morning-after chapter. This is it.

It’s tempting to treat drinking as part of the atmosphere, like bad lighting or loud music. Something incidental. Something that belongs to the room rather than the body. And for a while, it does. Conversations loosen. Arguments sharpen. People stay later than they should. Work gets talked about intensely, if not always made.

But alcohol is not neutral. It never was.

Few things reveal the inner life of artists more than where they choose to eat once they finally have a franc in their pockets. For the Impressionists, dining was never simply sustenance—it was strategy, camaraderie, theater, and the occasional act of defiance. Their restaurants tell the story of their rise: from noisy cafés of argument to polished dining rooms where turbot arrived under silver domes.

History is full of treaties written in ink—but many were sealed in sauce. "Food diplomacy" may sound quaint, but it has altered borders, changed empires, soothed enemies, and occasionally humiliated them. The table has always been a stage, and the meal a weapon or an olive branch. From Carême’s diplomatic cuisine to modern photo‑op hamburgers, the evolution of political dining tells us exactly how power works—and how it tastes.

If you have ever walked into a fine restaurant and felt a little smaller, a little more aware of your posture, or a bit uncertain about your knife, you may be experiencing the long shadow of Louis XIV. The Sun King did not invent haute cuisine to delight the palate. He created a world in which eating was a political act. The food was beautiful, but the real purpose was control.

New York has always had two art worlds: the one in the studios and the one at the bar. The former produced the work; the latter produced the legends. If Paris had its cafés, New York had its dimly lit rooms with sticky floors, cheap whiskey, and artists who argued, seduced, collapsed, and occasionally painted the bathrooms.

Below is a guided stroll through the great artist bars of New York City — who drank where, who paid, what they ordered, and what survives.

Not all generosity is institutional.
Most of it isn’t.

Most of it happens off the record, without witnesses, without announcements, without plaques. It moves quietly, passed hand to hand, story to story, like folklore.

Kenneth Noland bought materials for Jules Olitski when Olitski couldn’t afford them. Jasper Johns carried Roy Lichtenstein’s work to Leo Castelli when Lichtenstein couldn’t bring himself to do it himself. Agnes Martin slipped younger artists envelopes of cash in Taos—or simply showed up at their studios and gave them her full attention, maybe the rarest gift of all.

This is how Music from Salem describes itself: Music from Salem brings together musicians of international reputation to prepare and perform chamber music in the peace and beauty of rural Washington County, New York, and environs. Chamber music is classical music written for a small group of performers and encompasses a range of styles from the 18th century to today.

In a moment when so many conversations about art circle around markets—prices, auctions, returns—it feels grounding to remember Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, a retired postal worker and a Brooklyn librarian who built one of the most remarkable collections of postwar art on a pair of modest civil-service salaries. Their story is often told as a charming oddity, but it is something far more instructive: a long, sustained act of devotion that reshaped the lives of artists, the stability of galleries, and the cultural map of this country.

When I think about what keeps a small town alive, I don’t think only of festivals or fundraisers — I think of the quiet networks of generosity that feed people, ground them in dignity, and hold them together. That’s what Comfort Food Community does in Greenwich, and it matters deeply.

The artists who created the major foundations of the last century were not marginal figures or cautionary tales. They were serious artists with long, complex careers — people who knew what it took to keep working through uncertainty, invisibility, and the strain of daily life. Their foundations exist because their work succeeded, not in place of it.

I was fortunate enough to study contact improvisation with Steve Paxton when he taught dance at Bennington College, and to participate in a dance workshop with Trisha Brown at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program—the one summer it took place in New Mexico. So, it was no surprise to me to learn that Judson Church institutionalized generosity.

When dancing contact improvisation, you have to be completely attuned to the dancers around you. It’s a form where you literally feel your way through it—one person shifting weight, another offering balance, and both trusting that the floor, and each other, will be there. Trust is the foundation of this form of dance. People who understand this know that the welfare of those around you is intrinsically related to your own.

It is not a secret that I am obsessed with nineteenth-century French art, but so are most people with an avid interest in art. Besides the extraordinary work produced, the interpersonal relationships are also highly interesting, both the rivalries and the mutual aid. Monet could not have survived without Bazille; the Impressionists probably would not have been shown without Caillebotte. Rodin both helped and undermined Camille Claudel. And, of course, what would have happened to Van Gogh without Theo?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the schools I attended — Woodstock Country School and later Bennington College — were direct descendants of the Bauhaus experiment. Each believed that art was not a subject but a way of understanding the world. The lineage that ran from Weimar to North Carolina to Vermont shaped not only my education but the way I’ve made art ever since.

I don’t want euphemism. I don’t want erasure. I can acknowledge unforgivable acts and still argue the work belongs in public, framed honestly. I don’t want the truth whitewashed, and I don’t want the art erased. The real discipline is holding contradictory facts in your head without sanding them down, letting the discomfort do its work.

In my last post, I wrote about artists whose eyesight shaped their work—Monet, Degas, O’Keeffe, Chuck Close, and others. Their paintings bear the trace of cataracts, macular degeneration, blindness, or simply a different way of seeing. But sometimes words and canvases aren’t enough—we want to see these struggles brought to life. Luckily, filmmakers have been fascinated with the same question: what happens when an artist’s vision changes?

Most people think that seeing happens in the eyes. Light enters, the eye focuses, and the image appears. Simple. But the real story of vision is stranger than that. Our eyes collect information, yes—but the brain does the heavy lifting. It edits, organizes, fills in gaps, and sometimes invents. And every so often, the system glitches in ways that can be terrifying, beautiful, or both.

I’ve been thinking about eyesight lately, for obvious reasons. Cataract surgery is on my horizon, and as a painter, the prospect of altered vision feels both frightening and strangely fascinating. Artists have always made work with the bodies and eyes they have—sometimes diminished, sometimes distorted—and the art often bears witness to those changes.

After my opening at the Soprafina Gallery in Boston several years ago, friends invited me to dinner with their friends—an oncologist and his wife. Over the meal he told me about his research. He had access to mountains of data collected from patients over many years, and he and his team were struggling to mine the information for patterns that might predict cancer.