Word: painter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...16th century, screen painting had become as central to the visual culture of traditional Japan as fresco painting was to Italians. The very size of byōbu-which run to a width of twelve feet and more-was an exacting test of the painter's virtuosity in handling watercolor or sumi ink across large areas; it made the paintings into a kind of environment conducive to meditation and withdrawal. Because they were made for domestic use, the imagery of byōbu is generally secular. But Western categories of what is or is not secular make less sense...
...order to gain admission the applicant is asked, among other things, the relationship of Shakespeare to Othello, Dante to the Inferno, Brahms to music, and Whitman to poetry. He must understand such words as debutante and modiste, know that Dali is a painter and verity is the opposite of myth. Only after having established such credentials is a man judged to be qualified under the union rules to become an apprentice steam fitter in New York. In the past, the test has weeded out 66% of the nonwhite applicants and only 18% of the whites-a fairly effective method, according...
...years before he died in 1953 at the age of 83, John Marin was voted "the greatest living American painter" by a poll of critics and museum men. What the cranky, salt-bitten old Yankee thought of this honor is uncertain. Marin loathed the idea that art should become a monument, freezing its maker in the pose of a culture hero. "Art is not great," he once scribbled in that looping hand with which he covered innumerable scraps of paper with misspelled, queerly punctuated aphorisms. "Music is not great. It's just that they tickle us. When one steadfastly...
...when other artists were discussed. Most French painting he professed to ignore. "I saw a painting of a boat by Manet-to me it was a joke -to me Manet didn't know boats -didn't know the sea." Marin did, however, admire Boudin, the 19th century painter of seascapes and beach resorts-"He knew his boats." Indeed, there is more than a passing resemblance of spirit between Boudin's windswept promenades and sails leaning on empty horizons, and the magnificent succession of Maine seascapes for which Marin is best known. But that is all. Though Marin...
...until his return to New York and his marriage to Marie Jane Hughes that Marin took possession of his freedom as a painter. The Manhattan watercolors of 1911-13, with their thrust, chop and bustle of tower, facade and street, are a peculiarly American reaction to that delight in the tempos of urban life that, at the same moment, had seized the Cubists in Paris and the Futurists in Italy. It was a web of movement, great and small, that he would pursue for the rest of his career, and he described it with his usual laconic concreteness. "In life...