This gallery contains 1 photo.
A glance tells me this blog started in April 2018. This is April 2021. An anniversary month invites breaking the fourth wall for a moment. Brokenly, the endeavor here is twofold: (1) to practice writing; (2) to practice translating. I … Continue reading
I can study all day Alice Neel’s brushwork and modeling of flesh and features, how she gestures at her subjects’ surroundings with casual precision. Her “Carmen and Judy” has a frank, womanly exactness and searing intimacy that The New Yorker’s … Continue reading
“Between feces and urine we are born,” said Augustine in the 4th century. The bishop of Hippo’s take on parturition was that our mothers effectively defecate us from their feculent crannies. Doctrine on sex and love handed down by dour … Continue reading
… [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
“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
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
“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
“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
‘Gloopy Glory’
The paintings of 90-year-old Frank Auerbach, “last surviving member of a pathfinding generation of postwar British figurative painters,” are up my alley. Auerbach’s iterative pigment attacks are savage and astonishing, and Jason Farago is always good for a blue-streak of … Continue reading →