With Lucian Freud, the issue isn’t nudity, and it certainly isn’t pornography. The problem is the insistence on the abundant stuff of the physical world.
These small works are so full of complex narrative depictions, significant details, sophisticated symbols, and expressive marks that it is impossible not to wonder at their magic.
The current show at Met Breuer confirms that Marsden Hartley’s works number among the very best paintings of Maine, and of American modernism.
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.
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.
Pat Lipsky’s review of the Morgan Library & Museum’s current exhibition of Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver
“A bewildering but satisfying mix of tightly curved and woven-together thin steel rods” is how art critic and blogger Piri Halasz describes Peter Reginato’s sculptures.