Word: painter
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Microsociety is the dream child of George Richmond, a painter, teacher, author and acclaimed educator who was raised in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. His first job, at a Brooklyn elementary school in 1967, was a rookie teacher's nightmare. Richmond's fifth-graders skipped class, scorned homework and slept through lectures, their apathy and cynicism surpassed only by their appetite for petty classroom warfare. In the end, the young idealist from Yale threw up his hands at a system in which teachers who pretended to teach and students who pretended to learn did very little...
...attacking man are fused together as in a grim photographic overlap. Often his color is extremely beautiful, though the viewer, intent on the visual conundrums, may not at first notice how powerful and tender it can be. But as his friend Louis Scutenaire wrote, "Magritte is a great painter. Magritte is not a painter." He had no interest in what the French called la belle matiere, and when he did essay it -- as in a series of pseudo-pastoral kitsch- classical paintings in the manner of Renoir, done during World War II -- he subverted it; these hot, sluglike nudes...
...American Art in Washington and now at the Whitney Museum of American Art -- are dedicated to the almost forgotten artist William H. Johnson (1901-70). As a fine catalog by Richard Powell makes clear, Johnson's life was one of the saddest in the annals of American art. A painter of genuine talent, he suffered most of his life from the consequences of being born black in a deeply racist America -- and, it seems, from a sense of alienation from other blacks because he was half white. He came from a cotton hamlet in South Carolina and proved himself...
...tribal African art to a black artist in a Danish fishing village. "I myself feel like a primitive man," he told an interviewer in 1935, echoing the modernist founding fathers (Gauguin, Van Gogh), "like one who is at the same time both a primitive and a cultured painter." In essence, as the sculptor Martin Puryear points out in the catalog, European modernism let Johnson see himself anew; it provoked him into negotiating "his racial dilemma as a black artist moving between several worlds, on terms that are never stable...
...unlikely that this show will force a sudden rewriting of American art history. No judgment by aesthetic, rather than racial, criteria can make him into a lost "great American painter," though certainly he was a good one. The show, and in particular Powell's detailed catalog -- a benchmark in the study of black American art -- do open a door for Johnson's entry into that history, even though Powell's claim that Johnson was a kind of black Marsden ; Hartley, discovering full identification with his people through folk culture, passing from a "narrow and skewed" Eurocentric primitivism to a fully...