Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What we see in this wholly enjoyable show is a painter whose high moments (two owned by Paris' Musee d'Orsay, War and The Snake Charmer; two by MOMA, The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream; and one by a private collector, The Hungry Lion) must be weighed against a good deal of medium-rate work and potboiling. Enjoyment of the lesser Rousseaus is usually tinged with condescension, though at least they are not cute or kitschy, like the truckloads of pseudonaive painting that would sprout from Montmartre to Haiti after his death. They have their period charm; you have...
Schwartz said he does think that playing for other people is important, saying, "Music is like a language, it's a form of communication--you have to share it." He compared a musician that plays only for himself to a painter that keeps all of his artwork locked...
Today, Caravaggio almost ranks with Rembrandt and Velasquez as the most popular of all 17th century artists. Mythmaking has something to do with this. We have a proto-Marxist Caravaggio, the painter of common people with dirty feet and ragged sleeves. There is also a homosexual Caravaggio, moved into the spotlight during the '70s by gay liberation: the painter of overripe, peachy bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream. Most of all, there is Caravaggio the avant-gardist...
...battle between light and dark to such a pitch that the late work became hard to read; its forms turned anxious and flickering, as though snatched from the very throat of darkness. But by then, this confusion had acquired its own expressive integrity as the handwriting of a painter more and more possessed by death. Caravaggio's sense of mortality was the thing his imitators found hardest to copy. But this did not stop the spread of Caravaggism. Within a decade of his death his followers had diffused his message all over Europe: Caracciolo and Ribera in Naples, Georges...
Scratch almost any great 17th century painter except Poussin, and traces of Caravaggio will appear. The vivid, tragic piety of his work after 1600 was fundamental to baroque painting. Without his sense of humble, ordinary bodies lapped in darkness but transfigured by sacramental light, what would Rembrandt have done? Caravaggio was one of the hinges of art history: there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same. No wonder that he is now the artist that many new painters, in an age without authentic culture heroes, pine...