Word: burckhardt
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Historians today have thrown out one of the more optimistic ideas set forth in 1860 by Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering study of the Italian Renaissance, that in the 15th century women began to gain equality with men, acquiring a new social influence as individuals in their own right. The portraits in this show neither confirm nor deny this idea. Although they do show women getting more spectacular, the act of wearing jewels that still belong to their husbands doesn't mean independence...
...There was beauty as well as provocation in this new aesthetic. William Klein's video installation, Broadway by Light, captures the kinetic grace of Times Square's dancing lights as reflected on the surface of passing cars and wet asphalt. Rudy Burckhardt's photograph of an enormous Coca-Cola billboard dwarfing pedestrians on the street below is a masterpiece of black and white composition. Nor did the pop generation shrink from taking on the most traditional of subjects. In Wesselmann's Great American Nude No. 54, a painted female form sprawls beside a 3-D radiator, a telephone...
Peanut butter and jelly. Trinidad and Tobago. Bogie and Bacall. Some things are just meant to be together. The husband-and-wife exhibition at the Bernard Toale Gallery is a case in point. Walking into the display of Tom Burckhardt's paintings and Kathy Butterly's ceramics, all I could think was peas and carrots...
...recent tour of Asia as inspiration for the pieces on display and their artists' statements certainly reflect a shared intent: he is experimenting "in an attempt to see if everything can inhabit the same visual space," she calls her sculptures "collages," each one "a conglomerate of many passing ideas." Burckhardt works with enamel on wood-his paintings, all roughly the size of a sheet of notebook paper, are slick, colorful meditations somewhere between Dr. Seuss and Kandinsky. He often allows shapes in the underpainting to flicker through the top layer of images, struggling for more dimensions than his medium allows...
...sized ceramics successfully translate similar ideas into three-dimensional space. Each of her pieces is based around a roughly cylindrical blob of clay frozen in a state of writhing, blooming and collapsing-intricate and really quite elegant. In both cases, however, the "Asian" influence is a touch heavy-handed: Burckhardt seems to like cherry blossoms and dragons, while his wife incorporates those little bearded toothy-smiley dogs into a few of her pieces. The press release calls them Chinese Fu dogs, but, with Butterly's vivid glazes, flea market chintz is a more accurate description...