Tag Archives: painting

Be Paint

Posted on April 11, 2021 by JMN

… [Clement] Greenberg’s organizing idea was surprisingly simple: modern painting, having ceased to be illustrative, ought to be decorative. Once all the old jobs of painting—portraying the bank president, showing off the manor house, imagining the big battle—had been turned … Continue reading →

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Alice Neel: ‘Collector of Souls’

Posted on April 4, 2021 by JMN

“I would say she was looking at two ghetto children from uptown and bringing out the beauty in us.” [Jeff Neal, on left in the portrait with brother Toby.] (John Leland, “Two Brothers Posed for a Portrait. One Lived to … Continue reading →

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Wide Load

Posted on March 28, 2021 by JMN

Jason Farrago lavishes a container shipload of exegetical rumination on Julie Mehretu’s paintings. Lines accreted in an essentially radial configuration, with large arcs orbiting an absent central axis, and orthogonal spokes sprouting from the core. (The Mehretu black line is … Continue reading →

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Clarice Beckett – The Present Moment — leonieandrews — Silicon Valley Types

Posted on March 25, 2021 by JMN

“roll up your catalogue and view each picture through it. … You will be rewarded with a wonderful suggestion of light and air and sufficient detail, and finish.” So said critic Percy Leason and  fellow student of Clarice Beckett (1887- … Continue reading →

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‘El Borracho’ de Joaquín Sorolla

Posted on March 24, 2021 by JMN

“As if in preparation, with this deeply human painting he returned to his engagement with the Spanish peasant and, perhaps as important, to making brilliant use once more of the indispensable Spanish colour – black.” (Mark Brown, “National Gallery buys … Continue reading →

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Still Life

Posted on March 20, 2021 by JMN

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‘The Painting Just Falls Off the Brush’

Posted on March 5, 2021 by JMN

… Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks… “It is… necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick … Continue reading →

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Au Revoir, Dr. Ferlinghetti

Posted on February 24, 2021 by JMN

“In some ways what I really did was mind the store,” he told The Guardian in 2006. “When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather … Continue reading →

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‘Certitudes’

Posted on January 31, 2021 by JMN

This is the Cubist revolution: Here, for the first time in Western art since the Renaissance, the world as we see it no longer has primacy. The picture is no longer an act of perception. It’s an act of imagination, … Continue reading →

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‘Style Is Character’

Posted on January 29, 2021 by JMN

Didion once wrote, “Style is character…” Rhetorically, a “this is that” assertion that plops two abstractions around a copulative can be a facile expedient for simulating profundity. Nathan Heller comments that Didion’s observation about style has to do with “the … Continue reading →

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