Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Self-Portrait with a Horn, painted in 1938, the second year of his exile from Nazi Germany. Max Beckmann holds a bugle, which he has just blown. His eyes don't meet yours; he looks away, listening for an answering note. It's a piercing image of the artist deprived of his context, hoping to connect, uncertain that he can. European man, signaling from a collapsing world...
...masked warriors with spears and cuirasses along with the blond cigarette girls, the sexy shackled women in modern negligees and the awful birds with staring eyes that were one of Beckmann's prime images of fear and persecution. "Have you never thought," he wrote to a young woman artist, "that in the hellish heat of intoxication amongst princes, harlots and gangsters, there is the glamour of life?" That heat is everywhere in his paintings. If their forms weren't so fully and emphatically realized, if the bodies of men and women in his art were less dense and sensuously present...
...broadway classic "The Music Man," a slick con-artist arrives in the small midwestern town of River City and proceeds to convince the populace that they are facing an impending explosion of juvenile delinquency. The cause--a new pool hall that's just opened. The con-man tells the townspeople that the only way to save their children is to enroll them in a wholesome activity--a marching band--and then sells them expensive uniforms and instruments...
...upon which the figure of Bill T. Jones is repeated over and over again, in different moments of his dance. Frozen in motion, the language of his body is written clearly in the lines that Ritts has so perfectly captured. It is a powerful statement that sums up an artist who creates eloquence in silence, by letting people speak for themselves or by bringing out the lines of their bodies to tell their own stories...
Richardson knew Picasso in the last decade or so before the artist's death in 1973, and his account has a firsthand authority that subsequent biographies will lack. Those casually interested in Picasso may be advised to start their reading elsewhere; Richardson is not teaching Picasso 101 here but a postgraduate seminar that brilliantly corrects and fills in small details of a big picture that students are expected to know. It is a pleasure to see Picasso, his lovers and friends and rivals in the heady days when art mattered more than anything and greatness was only a passionate dream...