Archive for the ‘Painting’ Category

John Singer Sargent

Tuesday, June 29th, 1999

He was the pre­em­i­nent por­trait painter of his day, and he gave it all up to paint land­scapes. His pri­vate life is a mys­tery. His brush­work is still daz­zling. JOHN SINGER SARGENT seems to have walked out of the pages of a nov­el by Hen­ry James, who wrote of him: “Yes, I have always thought of Sar­gent as a great painter. He would be greater still if he had done one or two lit­tle things he hasn’t—but he will do.”

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Winslow Homer

Saturday, March 2nd, 1996

WINSLOW HOMER spent most of his life fish­ing and paint­ing, reel­ing in the deep, unfath­omable mys­tery of the sea. His pic­tures often show some­body gaz­ing out to sea, con­cen­trat­ing on some­thing no one else can see. Maybe it’s the light on the water, or the wind in the sails, or a boat com­ing home to shore, or just the flick­er of a dream.

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El Corazon Sangrante/The Bleeding Heart

Friday, November 1st, 1991

FRIDA KAHLO’s Self-Por­trait with Thorn Neck­lace and Hum­ming­bird shows her in a jun­gle with but­ter­flies in her hair and a hum­ming­bird dan­gling from a thorn neck­lace that pierces her neck, draw­ing small red drops of blood. “I nev­er paint­ed dreams,” she said. “I paint­ed my own reality.”

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Busch-Reisinger Museum

Saturday, September 14th, 1991

A crowd­ed stage, and all the play­ers on it. A king, wear­ing a crown, stabs him­self in the heart. A woman looks at her reflec­tion in a mir­ror, next to a stat­ue of a Greek god. Mod­ern men and women read the news­pa­per, talk, flirt, and fight with real knives. MAX BECK­MAN­N’s The Actors aims to encom­pass all of Art and Life in thick, sure slash­es of paint.

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John Singer Sargent’s EL JALEO

Wednesday, August 28th, 1991

In a dark, smoky room, a soli­tary dancer rais­es up her arm in a tense, ecsta­t­ic move­ment of inspi­ra­tion; her oth­er hand clutch­es the skirt of her dress — a flash of white light gleam­ing in the dark. You can almost hear the rhyth­mic weep­ing of the gui­tars; you can almost feel beat­ing of the dancer’s tumul­tuous heart.

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Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun

Friday, July 19th, 1991
Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun

Madame Vigee-Lebrun rev­o­lu­tion­ized the por­trait. She despised the pow­der and stiff clothes that women wore; she let their hair down, and draped them in soft, flow­ing shawls and paint­ed them look­ing soft, dreamy, nat­ur­al, alive. Her paint­ings helped to cre­ate a new look, a new style, a new atti­tude to life in pre-rev­o­lu­tion­ary Paris.

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Dream Lovers

Friday, July 12th, 1991

When Berthe Morisot met Édouard Manet at the Lou­vre in 1867, he was 36 years old and mar­ried; she was ten years younger and still liv­ing with her par­ents at home. She was live­ly, intel­li­gent, charm­ing, tal­ent­ed. He was bril­liant, dif­fi­cult, fick­le, famous, fas­ci­nat­ing. She had long admired him from a dis­tance; he imme­di­ate­ly want­ed to paint her portrait.

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A Tribute to Kojiro Tomita

Thursday, November 8th, 1990

It is said that CHU TA nev­er spoke — but he laughed, cried, waved his hands, and drank rice wine most expres­sive­ly while he paint­ed. Every sin­gle touch of Chu Ta’s brush means some­thing. Every mark still mat­ters. Hun­dreds of years lat­er, you can still almost feel the move­ment of his hand — the bold drunk­en touch of his brush.

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Madame de Pompadour

Friday, June 1st, 1990

Madame de Pom­padour always man­aged to look grace­ful, even in the most con­strict­ing clothes — corsets, bus­tles, and stays. Like Madon­na, she cre­at­ed a Look that was supreme­ly arti­fi­cial — the pow­dered hair, the heav­i­ly applied make-up, the elab­o­rate gowns. Like Madon­na in her John-Paul Gaulti­er bustiers, La Pom­padour in her negligée proud­ly dis­played her sex­u­al­i­ty as the source of her power. 

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Monet in the ’90’s: The Series Paintings

Monday, April 30th, 1990

In paint­ing after paint­ing, the earth moves and the water swoons and the sky tum­bles and all the blues and pinks and pur­ples and reds and oranges dis­solve into one. Earth and water come togeth­er, again and again, and explode in a sym­pho­ny of light and col­or and air.

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Farewell Concert

Thursday, March 29th, 1990

I loved THE CONCERT, the beau­ti­ful lit­tle paint­ing by VERMEER. Each time I looked at it, I saw some­thing new. Now it’s gone. I try to remem­ber every line, every shad­ow, every gleam of light, every sweet cadence of its silent music, but I can already feel it fad­ing. As time goes by, it will dark­en and grow dim. 

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Gyorgy Kepes

Saturday, March 10th, 1990

GYORGY KEPES paints with a mix­ture of oil paint and sand, which gives his work a rough, earthy tex­ture. He likes to tell the sto­ry of Antaeus, a hero who was the son of Moth­er Earth and could nev­er be defeat­ed as long as he touched the earth. Paint­ing with sand is Kepes’s way of touch­ing the earth.

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The Cone Collection

Sunday, January 28th, 1990

The CONE sis­ters col­lect­ed art because they loved it and want­ed to live with it. Their art col­lec­tion became an emblem of their secret selves — a vision of the rich­ness of their inner lives. Many of the images here show women the same expres­sion on their face — a look of con­tent­ment, com­plete­ness, and self-fulfillment.

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Mary Cassatt

Friday, July 14th, 1989

In many of the prints, a wom­an’s face is par­tial­ly obscured, either because of the way she has turned her head, or because she is hold­ing some­thing in front of her face ‑‑ a hand, a let­ter, a child. This con­veys a sense of mys­tery, a feel­ing that there are secret mean­ings and moments of tragedy and what Vir­ginia Woolf called “ecsta­sy” — hid­den in the tex­ture of a wom­an’s dai­ly life.

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Earth Day

Sunday, May 7th, 1989

“It’s all com­ing from mem­o­ry,” says ROBERT FERRANDINI. “From fairy tales, from child­hood — from imag­in­ing. The way I see it, it’s the land­scape of the mind. Lots of land­scapes came to me from the movies. Fort Apache. Red Riv­er. Cheyenne Autumn. The Searchers. The idea of the search — which is what I do as a painter. I go into it. I search.”

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Roger Kizik

Wednesday, April 19th, 1989

ROGER KIZIK’s loopy, stac­ca­to line describes fish­ing boats with names like Frol­ic or Finast Kind, hous­es on the beach, the book he is read­ing or the tool he is using for fix­ing up his house or boat. The things in his draw­ings press in on him; they clus­ter around him, rich with hid­den cor­re­spon­dences and secret mes­sages, com­pos­ing his life.

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Courtly Splendor: Twelve Centuries of Treasures from Japan

Tuesday, March 21st, 1989

The sil­very glow of the moon and the flow of an under­ground riv­er are reflect­ed in sin­u­ous cal­lig­ra­phy that swoons down a page from 12th cen­tu­ry book of poems, strewn with shim­mer­ing sil­ver ros­es: “True, I say nothing/ but the long­ing in my heart/ reach­es out to you,/ secret as the con­stant flow of an under­ground river.”

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Anselm Kiefer

Wednesday, February 1st, 1989

Anselm Kiefer uses the lan­guage of mod­ern art to rewrite the kind of grandiose nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry paint­ing that mod­ern art reject­ed. He paints a rag­ing ele­gy for the fail­ure of rea­son and civ­i­liza­tion to over­come the evil that is part of human nature. Yet for Kiefer, only the mag­ic of art can build some­thing beau­ti­ful out of the wreck of rea­son and the fail­ure of history. 

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Images of the Mind

Monday, May 19th, 1986

Tao Chi was a prince who became a wan­der­ing Bud­dhist monk. His “Melan­choly Thoughts on the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers,” cap­tures the mood of the end of autumn. A lone­ly fish­ing hut is half-hid­den by a few sparse trees; a flock of wild geese flies over a riv­er. The cal­lig­ra­phy echoes the flight of the birds and the quiver of the leaves. With­out under­stand­ing a word, we can feel the poetry.

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Robert Ferrandini

Saturday, December 1st, 1984

ROBERT FERRANDINI’s ear­ly work fea­tured fly­ing saucers and mon­sters, imagery drawn from a 1950’s child­hood spent watch­ing sci­ence-fic­tion movies like When Worlds Col­lide and The Thing. In his new paint­ings of imag­i­nary land­scapes and seascapes, he has come to some kind of terms with his past and is ready to move on. His space­ship has final­ly land­ed in a world of his own making.

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Renoir: A Lesson in Happiness

Saturday, December 1st, 1984

“His hands were ter­ri­bly deformed. Rheuma­tism had cracked the joints, bend­ing the thumb toward the palm and the oth­er fin­gers toward the wrist. Vis­i­tors who weren’t used to it couldn’t take their eyes off this muti­la­tion. Their reac­tion, which they didn’t dare express, was: ‘It’s not pos­si­ble. With those hands, he can’t paint these pic­tures. There’s a mystery!’ The mys­tery was Renoir himself.”

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Jean-Francois Millet: Seeds of Impressionism

Friday, June 1st, 1984

Jean-Fran­cois MILLET saw a time­less beau­ty and sad­ness in life, in evenings dark and filled with col­or. “What I know of hap­pi­ness is the qui­et, the silence, that you can savor so deli­cious­ly, either in the forests, or in the fields,” he wrote.

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New Wave Painting

Tuesday, June 1st, 1982

False masks of plas­tic beau­ty are among its mov­ing tar­gets. Des­per­ate to sur­vive the glis­san­do of the word proces­sor and the dead­ly lull of ordi­nary life, it rips to pieces the world’s fab­ric and its skin and puts it back togeth­er, obses­sive­ly recre­at­ing from scraps and scrawls and marks and images the objects of its desire and its rage.

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Flora Natapoff

Thursday, October 1st, 1981

The sur­face of a FLORA NATAPOFF paint­ing is a place where bat­tles have been fought, cities and tem­ples built up and brought down, and on which there has been a wrestling with angels. The means of expres­sion are abstract – marks on paper and scraps of paper that must always hold their own. But the ener­gy to work comes from look­ing at some­thing that moves her. 

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The Dial: Arts and Letters in the 1920s

Wednesday, April 1st, 1981

THE DIAL was a lit­er­ary mag­a­zine that pub­lished T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Vir­ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dal­loway, as well as repro­duc­tions of art­works col­lect­ed by Schofield Thay­er, a Hen­ry Jame­sian char­ac­ter who went abroad in search of old knowl­edge and new art. 

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Frances Hamilton: Books and Painted Stories

Sunday, February 1st, 1981

FRANCES HAMILTON has refash­ioned much-loved images, mem­o­ries, and dream­strans­form­ing them into a ful­ly re-imag­ined uni­verse. It is this trans­for­ma­tion – the seri­ous, dif­fi­cult task of art – that gives her work its pow­er to enchant.

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Ingres 1780–1980

Monday, December 1st, 1980

For a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry audi­ence brought up on abstrac­tion, INGRES’s great­ness, his fas­ci­na­tion, lies in the abstract qual­i­ties of his line, its rest­less, obses­sive move­ment across the page. Ingres’ line has pow­er, grace, life; it’s bril­liant, dra­mat­ic, neu­rot­ic, even per­verse. He told his stu­dents, “Draw­ing is every­thing; it is all of Art.” 

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Gabriele Munter: From Munich to Murnau

Saturday, November 1st, 1980

A woman sits think­ing, rest­ing her head on her hand in a room filled with flow­ers and fruit. The room seems charged with mean­ing, filled with her extra­or­di­nary pres­ence. For GABRIELE MUNTER, art was not about appear­ances, but about real­i­ties lying behind appear­ances. Abstrac­tion was a way of see­ing into the heart of things.

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