Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...street, but the now vanishing archetype of aristocracy, calm and straight as a Purdey gun barrel, with the look of arrogant security guaranteed to paralyze all lesser breeds from Calais to Peshawar. This invention began in 1632, when Van Dyck, an ex-assistant of the greatest court painter of his age, Peter Paul Rubens, arrived in London. It ended with his death at the age of 42, in 1641. In between came seven years of service to the court of Charles I and his wife Queen Henrietta Maria, during which Van Dyck attained the kind of success that few artists...
...French were fond of cats and bunnies; and the Germans liked galloping pigs. As fascinating as banners portraying the Jolly Fat Lady, the Cardiff Giant and the proverbial Two-Headed Calf were the artists who created these icons of the bizarre. The exemplary Snap Wyatt, a cigar-smoking sign painter, became one of America's midway masters in his Florida studio. He once built a 9-ft.-tall animated elephant stepping on a convicted Hindu for a traveling "torture show." Behind these neon-bright screams for attention, one can almost hear the barker . and smell the caramel corn...
Dictators' pastimes are far more striking because they often contrast with the rulers' normal behavior. Nero, no fiddler incidentally, did play the lyre and sing to vast, appreciative audiences. Hitler was a painter who started out doing postcard-size works of art and, as his career improved, worked his way up to large water-colors of wartime destruction: rubble, crumbled walls, caved-in roofs. Eventually he created his own subjects, a rare chance for an artist. According to his lackey, the featherbrained Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler also adored whistling. His best numbers were Harvard fight songs, which Putzi...
Hodgkin is 50 this year: a diffident man with a tough, discursive mind and a long background in art history, collecting and teaching. There is not a more educated painter alive, and it would be hard to think of one whose erudition was more exactly placed at the disposal of feeling. His paintings look abstract but are full of echoes of figures, rooms, sociable encounters; they are small, "unheroic" but exquisitely phrased. The space they evoke is closed, artificial, without horizon or other legible references to landscape. One seems to be looking into a box full of colored flats...
...arcane sort. But they seem casually, even inattentively deployed, coming out not as formal homages to this or that master but as a function of temperament. Like Bonnard, whose work he reveres, Hodgkin is a fidgety peeper into secular paradises and controllable realms of pleasure. But as befits a painter who makes no bones about his belief in the continuity of past and present, part of the pleasure lies in the conversation between his work and its sources...