Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plays brazened through the cliche barrier to make provocative comments on the battle between artistic integrity and professional survival. In Kent Broadhurst's lovely The Habitual Acceptance of the Near Enough, a Manhattan gallery owner (Frederic Major) instructs a brilliant, unknown painter (John C. Vennema) in the art of compromise; fortunately the lesson does not take. In Jeffrey Sweet's The Value of Names, Benny (Larry Block), a blacklisted actor who has revived his career on a TV sitcom, crosses rusty swords with Leo (Frederic Major again), the theater director who had testified against him before the House...
...painter from northern Italy visited that port twice, each time on the run: from a murder charge in Rome in 1606-07, and from the vengeance of the Knights of Malta in 1609-10. He never set up a proper studio with assistants in Naples; he took no pupils, held no salon and had little talent as a courtier. Yet by word of mouth, force of reputation and the example of four or five paintings he executed there, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio completely changed the face of Neapolitan painting at the start of the 17th century. A few months after...
...very surprising to learn that Ribera and two painter friends (Battistello Caracciolo and Corenzio) ran what amounted to an artists' Mafia in Naples, grabbing the commissions for themselves and frightening rivals with bloodcurdling threats. Poor Domenichino, the Bolognese master who had been invited to decorate the chapel of St. Gennaro in Naples' cathedral, rushed back to Rome in a state of collapse after hearing from this cabal. Grand Guignol abounded, especially in details like the amputated hand in the foreground of Massimo Stanzione's Massacre of the Innocents, which seems ready to scuttle away, like a pink...
Frida, a biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54), is a mesmerizing story of radical art, romantic politics, bizarre loves and physical suffering that raises the question, Why hasn't someone told it all before? Part of the answer is that Kahlo was the wife of Diego Rivera, the muralist and cultural provocateur who overshadowed nearly everybody and everything he touched. He would, in fact, have dominated this book about his wife if Biographer and New York Art Critic Hayden Herrera had not put him in his place...
Rivera was both Kahlo's hero and her baby, a relationship that endured through their marriage, divorce, remarriage and intervening separations. The 300-lb. painter can be summed up in a series of lingering images: a robust hulk on a scaffold, applying bright Marxist idealizations to the walls of public buildings; a blustery reveler brandishing a revolver to ensure attention; a celebrated philanderer openly displaying his conquests; and a monumental infant seated in a bathtub full of floating toys while Frida lathers his plump breasts...