Word: painterly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...manifesto: the ringing intellectual statement that will enable the heiress who can afford a Stella to explain to her Mount Holyoke-educated friends what those lines and curves are all about. At one time, a decent knowledge of classical mythology and the Bible was enough to understand what a painter was up to. Today, even an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary art can fail to inform the art-hungry heiress what her new Abstract Expressionist masterpiece is supposed to express...
...what is one to make of an opera about the life and turbulent times of Francisco Goya (Domingo, in robust voice) that omits almost every significant incident in the painter's life? Of a work that concentrates on a historically disputed love affair with the Duchess of Alba (Mezzo-Soprano Victoria Vergara), concluding with a gratuitous mad scene, replete with writhing spirits and fun-house demons? Of a score whose one striking musical device, an insistent, high-pitched whine signifying Goya's deafness, is borrowed from Smetana's string quartet From My Life...
...such apercus as "I have to paint to live. But I only live to paint." Never once, though, does Goya show its hero in the throes of creation. There is little sense of the penetrating psychological insight of his official portraits, and important events like his rise to court painter are only alluded to, or take place offstage. The horrors of the Napoleonic invasion, reflected in Goya masterpieces like the stark, brutal The Third of May, 1808, are suggested only in hallucination. Nobody claims that art must imitate life. But the real Goya, a man of passion and power...
...pines in the asylum garden -- had an apotropaic use for him, keeping at bay the demons of the unconscious. He wrote incessantly; his letters from the asylum, unmarred by a single note of self-pity, are among the most lucid and heartbreakingly frank disclosures ever written by a painter. He categorized and cataloged his work, a habit for which art historians, wishing Cezanne had done the same, have long been grateful. And in October 1889 he summed up the relation between his paintings and his illness in one piercing metaphor: "I am feeling well just now . . . I am not strictly...
...Chinese art is the representation of an idea," Wu Hung explains. "In Western art, there is less emphasis on the political attitude of the painter; instead, there is a personal relationship between the viewer and the painting...