Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...malapropisms -- calling the French painter "Toujours Lautrec," asking some fellow schemers to "include me out" of a deal -- gained Samuel Goldwyn a perverse fame as the archetypal Hollywood immigrant mogul, crude and semiliterate. But as A. Scott Berg demonstrates in this readable, richly researched biography, Goldwyn was never an archetypal anything, except in his poor Jewish origins in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Mayers and Warners, he made relatively few films, and he never built a mighty empire with a huge star roster and an immense distribution network. He was the ultimate independent producer, with a compulsive need for autonomy...
...been seen in Bologna (in a larger form) and Los Angeles. Reni was the leading Bolognese artist of the 17th century. For nearly 200 years after his death, he was adored by a long line of connoisseurs and tourists who held him to have been angelically inspired, the greatest painter of his age: as famous in his own way as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Van Gogh or Picasso. Percy Bysshe Shelley thought that if some cataclysm destroyed Rome, the loss of Raphael and Guido Reni would "be alone regretted...
Still, an artist deserves to be judged on his best work, and the idea that Reni was just a painter of saccharine devotional figures does not stand up. He will never get back on the pedestal he occupied in the 17th and 18th centuries, alongside Raphael. But there was a distinct grandeur in Reni, which his sometimes irksome professional smoothness served, and it is still perceptible today...
This show is the first in a generation to restore Reni; the last one, in his native Bologna, was in 1954. To a great extent it succeeds. When the various phases of Reni's work are assembled, he comes across as a far more diverse and interesting painter than one ever expected. His precocity and rate of absorption were equally striking, and they made room for sly humor, as in a pastiche of Caravaggio he did around 1605, when he was barely 30: David with the Head of Goliath, the David sporting a raffishly theatrical feather...
...common man, he was no kind of naif. He had studied in Paris before World War I and was closely tied to the expatriate avant-garde there, especially Stanton Macdonald-Wright, whose "synchromist" abstractions were among the most advanced experiments being done by any American painter. In New York in the early '20s, Benton dressed (as one of his friends would remark) like "the antithesis of everything American," and had a peripheral relationship to Alfred Stieglitz and the circle of his 291 gallery...