Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like face and huge eyes are guileless. Her innocence is believable and her naivete is charming. And thus she is utterly at odds with the chic gallery people who treat her like a lost puppy--lovable and amusing but not worth their attention. When Polly hears them say a painter has "acute awareness," she thinks they mean "a cute awareness, like a cute face...
...Metropolitan Museum of Art last week got its new season off to a magnificent start with the doctrinaire mystic of the Spanish Baroque, Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664). After Velasquez, El Greco and Ribera, Zurbaran was the best painter the so-called Golden Age of Spanish painting produced, but his work has never been seen in depth in America. Now, in one of those big transatlantic double acts the Met does so well, in cahoots with the Musee du Louvre in Paris, we have a show of 71 paintings organized by Jeannine Baticle of the Louvre. From this panoramic exposure...
What we read in Zurbaran as influences of El Greco's "spirituality" struck Pacheco as mannered and distracting. He did not mention his ex-pupil in his book. But Pacheco was a dry, insipid painter, and Zurbaran's slightly awkward fierceness must have been disturbing to a man whose chief pride lay in being the father-in-law of Velasquez. Zurbaran would not master the sense of secular decorum, the discreet and far-reaching rhetorical power of Velasquez's much greater art. He did not try to, since he was mainly painting for monks, not connoisseurs. He and Velasquez studied...
...feminine" late Zurbaran, with his fluid daylight effects and graceful, slightly stilted coloring, though less congenial to modern taste, was not by any means a painter to ignore. In any case, one now sees him whole for the first time, and the Met's show speaks with equal meaning to both experts and the general public. At a time when the rattle of turnstiles so often outvotes the voice of scholarship in American museums, such events unfortunately seem rarer than ever...
...occasionally ticks on reflexively when there seems to be nothing in particular on his mind. So with Bluebeard, whose hero is a wealthy, one-eyed old man named Rabo Karabekian, a magazine illustrator in his youth, then a soldier during World War II, then, briefly, an acclaimed abstract expressionist painter. There is a random quality to this history: Why one- eyed? Why a painter and not a cellist? Rabo's recollections are wistful and charming, but vaporous. The graceful pages are a gifted author's daydreams, but they never coalesce into a novel...