Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...scented with opiate-rich darkness, would have enjoyed the scene. For here, in this glass-fronted room glowing out of the duck of Boston, the sophisticates peered and exclaimed much as they would have a century or more ago at the opening of a Paris Salon. While describing the "Painter of Modern Life" in the mid-19th century, Baudelaire had hinted of the paradox that attends modernity...
...been surviving in virtual isolation in Manhattan since 1952. With his paintings of targets and of the American flag, he landed on point, in the spot, at centerstage: the Museum of Modern Art bought three paintings from that first show, an unheard-of gesture to an unknown painter, and the acquisitive frenzy and the search for bankable geniuses that would characterize the American art world in the '60s began in earnest...
From that moment, Johns' work, slowly done and irregularly seen, served as a still, enigmatic center to the turmoil it had helped provoke. In Johns, the '50s artist-imagined as "hot," expressive and tragic-was displaced by the didactic painter-hero of the '60s; a man of distances, margins and blocks, detachedly rendering the nuances of ambiguity through the most commonplace objects. But his work has not been seen whole. Now it can be: last week a retrospective of 201 paintings, drawings, multiples and prints by Jasper Johns opened at New York's Whitney Museum. Curator...
There is an arbitrary quality to Johns' recent motifs-the hatching and the painted flagstones. They seem hermetic and trivial, both at once. They lack the iconic force of the flags, maps, numbers and targets. No painter ever marked time more elegantly. But there can be no summing-up of a 47-year-old in midcareer. Johns is, at present, the Picasso of en-.ropy. But even that strange position commands respect, if not always allegiance or pleasure. -Robert Hughes
...chimera, the griffin, the manticore and the sphinx are familiar fauna that flourish outside traditional biology. Now it appears that unfamiliar flora grow outside of conventional botany. Or so says the protean Leo Lionni, 67, teacher, painter, sculptor, former art director of FORTUNE and author of a dozen delightful children's books. To illustrate, Lionni has literalized Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them"-and then removed the toads. What remains is a series of never-were "parallel plants," a vegetable kingdom with members rooted beyond the fences of nature and logic...