Word: lifesize
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Which is not to say that Thiebaud, earlier in his career, did not seem to have his own brand of vulgarity. The time was distant--20 years ago, in fact --and the "vulgarity" had to do with food. Jasper Johns had his ale cans, Claes Oldenburg his Brobdingnagian hamburgers. Thiebaud...
It is, however, untrue. Today it seems clear that Thiebaud's still lifes were far less interested in the manipulation of "cool" admass signs and pervasive cliches (the landscape of pop) than in traditional pursuits of realist painting, especially the celebration of minutiae of texture and light.
Thiebaud is weaker, because more illustrational, as a draftsman of the human body. He renders it with stolid accuracy, but never endows it with the depth or concision of feeling that infuses the still lifes; the flesh aspires to the condition of vinyl.
The work of Matisse is a carnival: of light, of warmth, of eros and of art itself. Matisse (Rizzoli; $95) is a celebration of the celebrator: a formidable, 752-page volume with 930 illustrations that took 14 years to prepare. Not a minute was wasted. The French master's...
Except for a few intense and contorted still lifes, all the paintings in this show are of the human figure, usually centered, glaring outward with the dilated mania of the eye that first transfixed its audience in the preparatory paintings for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon three generations before. No...