Category Archives: Commentary

Opinion or analysis concerning whatever’s on my mind.

Protecting the Male

(c) 2020 JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Slackoff from Windbaggage

Art Spiegelman’s comment below, encountered on the fly as if on zoom wings, has helped me realize that this latest painting is just wrong: grotesque in subject, torpid in execution, and the end of a line. Fury and disgust can … Continue reading

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Blurred Stupid Dulled’

Hilma af Klint inspires a certain perfervid evangelism which is diluted in this article by careless editing. The article cites a beautiful film by Halina Dyrschka about the visionary artist’s astonishing work. The beguiled film maker contracted [sic] MoMA to … Continue reading

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘A Fond Infected Look’

A novelist’s prose can crowd poetry turf with an ineffability that thwarts paraphrase. Of his mother a protagonist says: “Ten minutes she will spend in the kitchen working with her swift cat-efficiency, then out and away with the children, surging … Continue reading

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Whenever I Feel Bad…’

This gallery contains 1 photo.

Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred that one bears for the other. In … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Shoes, Cans, Clocks, Bricks… and Hoods

This article describes Philip Guston (1913-1980) as an “artist’s artist” whose “deceptively simple subjects and emphatic brush strokes” influenced many painters of our era. … Part of the reason he is embraced by artists in the current moment is that … Continue reading

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Hopper Reveal

It’s interesting to see instances of a teenage Edward Hopper’s copying of other artists, the more so as it touches on the reputation he cultivated “as an artist whose innate genius allowed him to emerge on the scene without a … Continue reading

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Forest and the Trees

This gallery contains 1 photo.

I had a photograph of a forest. A Sherwood of a forest — florescent, bosky, a thing you can’t make up. And I made up a Mickey fantasia of a forest — florid, tumescent, burnt down with color and intricate … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Rimbaud and Verlaine

The seventy-five persons interred in the French Pantheon include Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas, Hugo and Malraux. None is there for poetry. (Victor Hugo was honored for his political attainments.) There is now a movement afoot to transfer the remains of Arthur … Continue reading

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Reframing Philip Guston

This week, the directors of [the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tate Modern in London, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston] released a joint statement saying that they were “postponing the exhibition until a … Continue reading

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment