Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Discharged from the military in 1945, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts. Over the next several years, he moved between the East and West coasts. His work from the late '40s to the early '50s was essentially abstract, though with strong overtones of landscape space and color. A considerable influence of Willem de Kooning bore on it. De Kooning, Diebenkorn felt, "had it all, could outpaint anybody, at least until the mid-'60s, when he began to lose it." But Diebenkorn's friendship with the Bay Area painter David Park, who bravely refused to accept the reigning...
This virile structure enabled Diebenkorn to explore all manner of nuances, shifts of tone, transparencies and textural quirks in the areas of color it defined. It let the picture bear provisional or openly corrected passages, without degenerating into niggle, mess and muddle. Structure was the key, not just to Diebenkorn's forthrightness as a painter but to his delicacy as well. And it survives even in the little still lifes, which are hardly more than visual nouns--a glass of water on a gray cloth, with orange poppies in it; a knife in another glass, bent by refraction--rendered with...
...make that shift less clear. Benfey highlights a pair of paintings to illustrate the change, the photographically realistic A Cotton Office in New Orleans and the much blurrier, Impressionistic Cotton Merchants in New Orleans. Office, as the frontispiece, is the only painting in the book to be reproduced in color. Merchants (visible in full color at the Fogg), like the other well-chosen and well-placed illustrations, is only a small black-and-white reproduction. The loss of color is lamentable--Dancers, Pink and Green loses its panache in gray--but the lack of clarity in the reproductions is more...
...described by Benfey, did indeed attract Degas. A seething maelstrom beneath its exquisite veneer of refinement, the city threatened to be torn apart by racial conflict during Degas' stay. Some of his prominent relatives belonged to a league designed to facilitate business ties between whites and free men of color; others belonged to a white supremacist league. (As this book reveals for the first time, Degas had some relatives among those free men of color.) Not just the Musson family but all of New Orleans was similarly split. Lingering bitterness against Reconstruction was easily detectable, as was the frantic energy...
...those who haven't consumed a steaming-hot H & H bagel at three o'clock on a Sunday morning, it may be difficult to understand what all the fuss is about. But just as the art expert will never be able to convey to the color-blind woman at the Picasso exhibit what she's missing, the bagel-lover will have a hard time converting the uninitiated. The allure of the fresh, well-made bagel, alas, defies verbal explanation. And yet despite this handicap, in recent years the bagel has been popularized across the nation, a development which culminated...