Tag Archives: painting

‘There’s Nothing There Except the Pictures’

The artist Jim Nutt has been making a version of this imagined portrait for the last 40 years, a mode that has dominated his practice… His women never age, never seem to dislodge from a midcentury stylistic amber: all wearing … Continue reading

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Arab Figure Painting

Last December The Times published an article about an exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, titled “Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960.” The show spotlights 85 rarely seen works in the … Continue reading

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Ixnay on the Ocracy, Theo! LOL

This gallery contains 1 photo.

Things need to work themselves out.A round of unkinking is due.Mistakes were made. Put a few fires out. Make nice again.Fast backward to the good times.Park the ordnance. Cool your jets. The killing, the killing, give it a rest! LOLBled … Continue reading

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The Zen of Falling Short

The thin, gray quality of the old man’s face suggest [sic] that even a Zen master’s identity is evanescent, while the dark intensity of his eyes captures the timeless persistence of his understanding. A series of feathery, beautiful strokes come … Continue reading

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Savage Women

The plasticity of the modeled flesh; the acuity of the subject’s skeptical gaze distorted by skillfully hinted pince-nez spectacles; the wristwatch: the rich blacks of garb against a brushy olive background: these excite notice in the expressive portrait of Berthe … Continue reading

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‘Artistic Project Born from Disastrous War and Political Disenchantment’

“I have been drawing,” Beckmann wrote to his wife one evening, after a day caring for men who’d survived the trenches. “That protects one from death and danger.” Though he never served at the front, Beckmann had a nervous breakdown … Continue reading

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‘Heartfelt, Slapdash, But Unredeemed by Art’

Art is something scrappy and strange; it may hiss rather than purr. How it redeems, presumably, is at the heart of the critic’s project, but also the lay consumer’s. That’s me. In doodling my readings of <clears throat> lineated discourse, … Continue reading

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His First Word Was ‘Pencil’

“What I’ve come to realize after 30 years of research is that the pictorial output of Picasso basically consists of drawings rendered in paint. His entire oeuvre is conceived, anticipated and elaborated through drawing.” (Anne Baldassari) Give my my pencil, … Continue reading

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Frans Hals ‘Bet Everything on Portraiture’

Hals bet everything on portraiture… It was a profession, not a calling. His job was to disappear into the paint. (Zachary Fine) For me Vermeer is glassy and distant where Hals is rudely… reachable. The tossed-off affect of his paintings’ … Continue reading

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‘A Spume of Green or a Blood-Red Fog’

[Rothko] modeled a commitment to abstraction that charged at the hardest questions of life and art through refusal of the easy path… [He] never thought of [his paintings] as peaceable. “Behind the color lies the cataclysm,” he said in 1959 … Continue reading

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