Word: alcalay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Self-Portraits begins with a shot of Alcalay performing his most arduous daily task: the morning climb to his third-story studio. Alcalay mounts the stairs with a cane, one hand gripping the rail. The artist himself is narrating, as he does for most of the film, describing painting, in this moment of hardship, as the “pinch...
...Alcalay was taught by the German artist Michel Fingesten, who also imprisoned in the camp and taught his student the crucial lesson of the artist—not how to make art, but how to live...
After this encounter, Alcalay says in the film, “I realized that art was spirituality, not technique.” From then on Alcalay’s artistic awareness was entwined with the consciousness of being alive. When he was finally released from the concentration camp, the sun struck him “like a ton” and he fainted...
...York in 1951 was “a new reality” for Alcalay, or a full-bodied assault on his artistic sensibilities. Amidst the skyscrapers and the “madhouse” of Times Square, always with “jazz pounding in his head,” he was stunned and momentarily unable to shake free...
...painter, Alcalay was initially influenced by the Expressionist movement, then moved deeper into his love of landscape. He realized later that the three worlds among which he moved—Expressionism, landscapes and abstract painting—and which became in their disparateness a source of frustration, were not mutually exclusive. In the end, the landscape still needed to be expressed by his brush...