On a visit last week to New Haven, all roads led to Venice, or so it seemed to me. What with the midday traffic on Church Street, maybe I just wanted to go somewhere far away, where there are no cars.
The Morgan show offers a reason to stop and admire different virtues, from a time when piety and painting were synonymous, and portraiture was undertaken with the intensity of a newfound love.
Leaving the Four Arts and the art of a near-distant past, one is struck by how quickly what was once novel is now accepted in staid surroundings, though rarely quickly enough for the artists themselves to reap material benefit.
Blakelock fought with his paint until his images magically evolved into the mystical, musical nocturnes of silence he sought.
The show at Galerie St. Etienne is a less than subtle reminder that the same issues which drew moral outrage in the last century—labor unrest, economic disparity, political corruption, the cloud of nuclear war—are very much with us.
Guido Cagnacci’s signature theme was the half-length female nude, which satisfied the three standard criteria of such artworks: a narrative foundation, showmanship of technical prowess, and an erotic hook.
Fairfield Porter painted images of a leisurely life on Long Island and in Maine when abstract expressionism was ascendant, and in that zeitgeist the idea of an American artist chronicling a trouble-free suburban environment would easily be taken for dilettantism.
Valentin is the sort of artist I would have been thrilled to discover during my student years: richly talented, emotionally dark, and, best of all, virtually unknown in America.
It is not only the quality of Rembrandt’s painting and design that comes through in this work; it is the quality of his mind and the nature of his heart.
I’m sure most of you have had favorite works of art that you’ve examined repeatedly over the years. They keep us engaged as great art does, telling us more with each viewing and over time we have grown to accept more with our own maturity as viewers and artists.