Word: draftsmanship
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...massive vaults like religious apparitions. An enigmatic spotted beast with a round snout and straight, forward-pointing horns, plump horses in brilliant yellow and deer with treelike antlers - all seem in equal part intimates of the present and missives from some distant world. Which they are. Though the draftsmanship is strikingly Modernist - on exiting the cave in 1940, Pablo Picasso said, "We have invented nothing" - these creatures were painted and inscribed on the limestone walls during the Upper Paleolithic age, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer, and Homo sapiens coexisted with Neanderthal man. They are evidence of the quantum leap...
...somewhere between Vermeer and Disney, a hard spot to locate, much less evaluate. But whatever else he was, Rockwell was the road not traveled. You go through this show wondering what 20th century art might have been like if it had not been so quick to put aside anecdote, draftsmanship and the raptures of watching paint do its dead-on imitations of other stuff. In short, what it might have been like if it valued more what Rockwell did. Given the essential places where painting had to go, places where Rockwell couldn't follow, maybe art had to put those...
...artists are happy if they are starving. Details of the teaching, evolution and politics of art and artists alike are recounted in succinct, if not breathtaking, prose. Stylistic languages, frivolous fads and "debates at the Academy on the merits of color versus line" populate the world of French draftsmanship...
...liquor distributor and his mother Cornelia Nobel--reputedly a woman of fearsome toughness--ran a sailors' bar on the waterfront. He studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts in the 1920s. It often used to be said that de Kooning got an extensive training in classical draftsmanship there. This wasn't true. What he wanted to be was a commercial artist, an illustrator--to do the kinds of illustrations he had seen in American magazines...
...lesser notebooks. Compared with the Renaissance master's other surviving manuscripts, Codex Leicester (named for the English family that owned it for two centuries) is trifling, just 18 sheets of linen paper folded in half to produce 72 pages. It contains only modest samples of Leonardo's celebrated draftsmanship--no spectacular drawings of flying machines, no cutaways of the human anatomy or exploded views of geared gadgetry. Still, Microsoft's billionaire boss surely got his money's worth. Of thousands of unbound manuscript pages produced by Leonardo (1452-1519), Codex Leicester is the best evidence of his enormous powers...