Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FILM opens in 1936 in the dust-bowl town of Pampa, Texas, where Woody is earning just enough money as a sign painter and square dance fiddler to keep his family from starving to death. Pampa is an oilboom town gone bust, a grim, Depressionera morning-after the gala twenties, when the oilmen and farmers came in droves. Now the money and water are gone, the land parched and worthless. All that's left is the dust--huge, billowing black clouds of destruction and death rumbling across the prairie. Production designer Michael Haller's re-creation of a Pampa dust...
...when his father finally gave in to his insistent artistic aspirations, Edgar-Hilaire-Germain de Gas (who, spurning the aristocratic connotations of the original, later changed his name to Degas) sought out his revered mentor. He asked Ingres what he should do to become a great painter, as if such advice could be capsulized into a brief rejoinder. But Ingres, never at a loss for a fast and memorable answer to bottomless questions like this, told Degas simply: "Draw lines, young man, many lines, from memory or from nature; it is in this way that you will become a good...
...lives of hard work, frustration and all-too-frequent boredom. They suggest a sense of physical inadequacy to do justice to abstract ideals of ballet, horse-racing or even bourgeois femininity. Degas expressed this despair with regard to his artistic ambitions, when, in old age, he told the painter De Valernes: "I felt myself so badly made, so badly equipped, so weak, whereas it seemed to me that my calculations on art were so right. I brooded against the whole world and against myself." But if Degas sulked and inwardly doubted himself, he presented a facade of cool intelligence, sardonic...
There was once, in the West, a tradition of demonic art. It no longer exists because-The Exorcist and other light satanic amusements notwithstanding-nobody much believes in devils any more. Perhaps the last significant European painter who did believe in them, and was able to project his anxieties onto them and make the demonic a chief theme of his work, died...
...immanence, fascinated Ensor. It gives a special tension to his skeleton pieces, mask paintings and the street scenes of his best years, from about 1885 to 1900: glitter and death, dark subjects and brisk high tones. The brutally emphatic imagery was created with a disconcerting sweetness of touch. Skeleton Painter in His Atelier, 1896, typifies this: the surface is almost as pretty as a Bonnard (though not nearly so well painted), and the very fact that Ensor was not trying to use illusionist tricks to convince viewers of the skeleton's reality lends his image a paradoxical strength-that...