Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other people's art . . . a sense of manic cerebralism and arbitrariness, a distance, even an indifference . . . riddled with sophisticated obviousness." The work is set up like an automatic mechanism, but hand-painted in a capricious parody of pictorial richness. A load of modernist signs for sensual delight--thick, ropy color that invokes the transparency of water, spots and scribbles betokening light, bits of Matisse interiors, Dufy ports, Bonnard trees, Monet ponds--is dumped on the eye and offered for identification as quotes. Bartlett's studio was one of the places where the '80s mania for "appropriation" began...
Nothing could be more banal, but Bartlett attacked this motif from dozens of stylistic angles and levels of attention, from Dufyesque silhouettes of color to gaudy calendar-art cliches, from cautious realist scrutiny to Warholian transcriptions of holiday-snapshot cropping. Sometimes the scene is light and sun-drenched, sometimes it is drowned in bloom and speckles, or elided by pastel smudges, or darkened into an eerie nocturnal calm. There is no favorite medium; Bartlett uses gouache, watercolor, ink, pastel, crayon, oil and pencil with almost equal facility...
...Back to the Future) more often than they flop (Young Sherlock Holmes). But from the geriatric elite of Hollywood, Spielberg got no respect--no Oscars, that is. So here comes Steven the Nice, with his first "respectable" motion picture, an adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel The Color Purple. It bears the same relation to his more personal films that The 1986 Alice Walker Calendar, now on sale in bookstores, bears to the powerful fable that made her famous: a lavishly illustrated, well-intended, self-inflicted knockoff...
...Color Purple is an epistolary novel: a child's letters to God, written by Celie, a poor black girl in early-20th century Georgia. Celie's story is one both of injustice, at the fists of black men, and of emotional regeneration, at the caressing hands of black women. The demotic narrative style, filled with humor, horror and the obsession to survive, softens Walker's messages: Sisterlove is beautiful, and Men stink. We are inside Celie's head, and for all the tragedies stored there, it is a lovely place to live. It might also seem the perfect spot...
...filmmaker as gifted as Spielberg can cow or neuter his talent forever. The Color Purple is speckled with epiphanies, especially in a flash of crosscutting that magically transplants an African plain, where Nettie has gone as a missionary, behind a Georgia bush; Celie looks up from her hymnal and--wham!--a bulldozer crashes through the chancel of Nettie's church thousands of miles away. None of this bravura, though, has liberated the attractive cast. Whoopi Goldberg suffers knowingly as Celie; Danny Glover, as "Mr.," looks vainly for a note to strike besides befuddled menace; Margaret Avery inhabits Shug without illuminating...