Word: painter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Ben Nicholson, 87, British painter whose abstracted images of still lifes and landscapes formed the main link between English art and the continental cubist-constructivist tradition; in London. Born into an artistic and moneyed family, he began as a realistic painter before developing an abstract geometric style...
...casts a long shadow over modern art. His career took him to most of its centers: Munich before World War I, Russia, and next a long sojourn at the Bauhaus in Germany during the 1920s, then a last expatriation to Paris after the rise of Hitler. If ever a painter carried his culture in one portable labyrinth on his back, as if he were a rambling snail, it was Kandinsky. And while he did not invent abstract art on his own (as he and his admirers were given to claim), he certainly did more to promote the notion of ideal...
...spent his whole life waiting for this Theosophical heaven-on-earth and trying to work out its art language, in which colors would have the semantic exactness of words, and sounds the precision of things. The prospect of its imminent arrival was one of his favorite subjects as a painter: thus a pioneering near-abstract work like Small Pleasures, 1913, is actually about the apocalyptic disappearance of the material world, the vanishing of the "mere" delights of body and landscape. As this show repeatedly makes clear, the fantasy of evolution from matter into spirit was shared by other Munich artists...
...signs that he was right after all - as preludes to the end of history itself, the millennium. What distinguished him from other mystagogic nuts, however, was his talent as an artist. On the evidence of this show, he was far and away the most gifted painter of his generation in prewar Munich. Even his student drawings of the nude have a wiry and controlled strength in their ink-brushed line. Others might, and did, imitate Monet, or Beardsley, or Seurat, or the bright, flat patterns of "primitive" Austrian folk art; only Kandinsky could bring such diverse strands successfully together...
...strange excavated space of El Greco's paintings, simultaneously vast and womblike, in his work after 1947. Because of his aspirations to sublimity, it is difficult to assimilate Pollock-as some authorities have wished to do-to the traditions of the School of Paris. The French painter he most admired, the surrealist André Masson, was set against the pre-eminently French virtues of lucidity, calm and mésure. An extraordinary number of strands are braided and involved in Pollock's work, from Indian sand painting to the theory of Jungian archetypes, from Zen calligraphy...