Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...casts a long shadow over modern art. His career took him to most of its centers: Munich before World War I, Russia, and next a long sojourn at the Bauhaus in Germany during the 1920s, then a last expatriation to Paris after the rise of Hitler. If ever a painter carried his culture in one portable labyrinth on his back, as if he were a rambling snail, it was Kandinsky. And while he did not invent abstract art on his own (as he and his admirers were given to claim), he certainly did more to promote the notion of ideal...
...spent his whole life waiting for this Theosophical heaven-on-earth and trying to work out its art language, in which colors would have the semantic exactness of words, and sounds the precision of things. The prospect of its imminent arrival was one of his favorite subjects as a painter: thus a pioneering near-abstract work like Small Pleasures, 1913, is actually about the apocalyptic disappearance of the material world, the vanishing of the "mere" delights of body and landscape. As this show repeatedly makes clear, the fantasy of evolution from matter into spirit was shared by other Munich artists...
...strange excavated space of El Greco's paintings, simultaneously vast and womblike, in his work after 1947. Because of his aspirations to sublimity, it is difficult to assimilate Pollock-as some authorities have wished to do-to the traditions of the School of Paris. The French painter he most admired, the surrealist André Masson, was set against the pre-eminently French virtues of lucidity, calm and mésure. An extraordinary number of strands are braided and involved in Pollock's work, from Indian sand painting to the theory of Jungian archetypes, from Zen calligraphy...
Richard Diebenkorn, 59, is by fairly general consent the dean of California painters. A former Marine who began his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, Diebenkorn started as a representational artist in the 1940s, became an abstract painter, returned to the theme of figure-in-landscape in the 1950s and then, from 1967 onward, gradually began to make himself a world reputation with a sequence of essentially abstract canvases that he christened the "Ocean Park" series, after the section of Santa Monica where he now lives. Yet there was nothing veering or arbitrary about the changes in his approach...
...relish he relates how a Chesapeake Bay snowstorm turned back a submarine specially equipped for polar exploration, captained by an explorer who had sold his story to a publisher before even setting out. An almost perfect example of occasional verse is "I Paint What I See." It pits radical Painter Diego Rivera against Nelson Rockefeller in discussion of the artist's huge and bustling Radio City mural that contained a head of Lenin...