Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Leger (1881-1955) is the only one of the great early 20th century French Modernists who hasn't had a major museum show in America in nearly half a century. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Duchamp and others, yes; but not Leger--a fact that is doubly odd, since no French painter, indeed, no French cultural figure of any kind, was more fascinated and stimulated by American culture, or did more to make a bridge between Paris and New York. Now, with an excellent and tightly focused show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, this has happily changed. Curated by Carolyn...
Sheridan also feels that cigarettes enhance his work as a painter...
...into view. A Lover's Almanac, by Maureen Howard (Viking; 270 pages; $24.95), is a funny, grouchy, madly nonlinear love story that commences in Manhattan after a drunken quarrel at a turn-of-the century party. Artie, a free-lance computer wizard, has behaved badly, and Louise, a gifted painter of enigmatic farm scenes, has kicked him out of their apartment. The novel, of course, must get them back together. But the narration is chaotic, scattered, raisined with fathomless almanac entries ("February 3, 1874--Gertrude Stein born at Allegheny, Pennsylvania"). Coherence rarely proceeds more than a few pages...
...delicious and intelligently presented exhibition, almost perfect of its kind, and completely free of the depressing curatorial gimmickry that American museums so often go in for these days. It sets before you a sparsely documented man of whom enough will never be known: a devout religious painter who lived through a time of doctrinal crisis in the church, which left visible marks on his already self-reproachful and even morbid personality; a link between the exaggerated graces of Botticelli (who died when Lotto was around 30) and the learned artificialities of Mannerism; an Italian who saw the point of Netherlandish...
Lotto was born in Venice, and he lived there intermittently through the last 24 years of his life, but most of his work was done in the "provinces"--not necessarily a bad thing for a painter in the early 16th century, since the competition in Venice was so intense and intelligent patronage was plentiful in smaller towns. Lotto seems to have been diligent rather than aggressive: hypersensitive, a loner and ill-adapted to the scramble for commissions. "Old, alone, without anyone faithful to manage things for me, and very anxious in my mind"--so he described himself in his will...