Word: painterly
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...mildly, a bit of a bore. For Freud, despite his quota of failed pictures (failed, however, by standards to which most living artists don't aspire), is the best realist painter alive. To watch the development of his work -- even in the abbreviated form of one show -- is like watching a wily cock salmon compelled upstream by instinct, against the cataracts of modernist history, following its desires. Most of the major stylistic events in art since 1900, starting with late Cezanne and going on through Cubism to abstraction in its various forms, have had no apparent impact on Freud...
...sock dangling from the other foot, penis flopping askew, turns out to echo closely the pose of that Hellenistic image of postbacchanalian fatigue, the Barberini Faun. And so on. Freud doesn't quote ostentatiously, but he is an artist with a full memory -- as any serious painter must be. There is no level on which he could be accused of having an "innocent...
...imagine a painter like Freud emerging in America today? It's hard to, maybe impossible. He affronts too many orthodoxies, starting with the central one: the belief that realism -- the painting of things from direct observation, warts and all -- is dead or, at best, irrelevant. You may quote the human figure from mass-media sources, by means of photography, silk-screen and so forth. Or stylize the guts out of it, so that it approaches abstraction. Or else run "expressionist" variants on it, which have nothing to say about any struggle with the real and resistant motif, since no such...
...COLUMBIAN ART AND THE POST-COLUMBIAN WORLD, by Barbara Braun (Abrams; $75). African sculpture and its influence on modern art is well documented. Less so is the effect of ancient American design on 19th and 20th century painters, sculptors and architects. Braun traces the aesthetic roots of artists such as sculptor Henry Moore, painter Paul Klee and architect Frank Lloyd Wright back to the Maya, Aztec and pre-Columbian civilizations of Peru...
...visual arts, cultural outsiders often see what insiders miss. Japanese-born painter Masami Teraoka combines elements of European art and Japanese ukiyo-e wood-block imagery. From his unique perspective, he creates gothic halos around the heads of AIDS patients and condoms in the bedrooms of samurai. In his Harlem neighborhood, Jamaican-American artist Nari Wood collects discarded baby carriages and ties them together with fire hoses, making monuments to loss...