Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fountain toppling behind him. Altogether too much of the exhibition is pulpy with triviality. Ontani, who dresses in historical costume or mythological nudity and has himself photographed (not only as Dante, but as Christopher Columbus, Don Giovanni and even Leda), is a natural clown. But as a painter he is fatuous, and his watercolors, full of Donald Ducks and magic mushrooms, would have looked dumb on Haight-Ashbury 15 years ago, let alone in New York today...
...major painter? Of course not; he is a salon wit. Cliche piles on cliche...
...doppelgangers and harsh schematic landscapes-are elaborately ill-painted in order to support the fiction of terminal earnestness. This, of course, is the main trick in the repertory of neo-expressionist effects, and Cucchi does it over and over again. The best of his paintings here, The Mad Painter, 1981-82, seems to parody this condition; the rest simply deploy their accepted rhetoric of crudity as vitality. Artists of Cucchi's persuasion, wild pets for the super-cultivated, serve many useful ends. One is the recycling of old 1950s adjectives. "Primeval," "raw," "overpowering," "harsh"-here they are again, ready...
...Piazza Vittorio Veneto, is surrounded on three sides by plain, deep-shadowed arcades; these serried slots of darkness are the obsessive motif of De Chirico's cityscape. He may have grasped their poetic opportunities through looking at Böcklin's paintings of Italian arcades, but no painter ever made an architectural feature more...
...treat De Chirico solely as a dream-merchant precursor of surrealism does his early work a grave injustice. In his organization of the show, William Rubin contends that De Chirico survives as a painter within a specifically modernist framework, whose standards were generated in the 30 years before 1914 in Paris. That was "the city par excellence of art and the intellect," as De Chirico wrote, where "any man worthy of the name of artist must exact the recognition of his merit." Paris took young De Chirico, as it took young Chagall, and turned him from a naive provincial fabulist...