Word: painterly
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...Philadelphia Museum of Art and treated to a piercing catalog exegesis by its curator Mark Rosenthal. , Johns' presence at the Biennale seems to close the American parenthesis that Rauschenberg opened there 24 years ago, and one leaves it convinced he is the deepest of living American artists, a painter whose subtlety and richness of imagination stand beyond doubt even when, as sometimes happens, one cannot find a direct way among the hints, inversions, repetitions and false scents in which his art abounds...
...formalist geography lesson could not last, of course. In the '80s it came apart like wet Kleenex. America has no single culture, but cultures. And so it should, since diversity is better than monotony. In any case, many ethnic Americans are still exiles within the dominant, white matrix. One painter in this show, Martin Ramirez (1885-1960), epitomized the extreme fate of the Hispanic as outsider. A migrant railroad worker from Mexico, Ramirez lost his powers of speech and became a catatonic schizophrenic in Los Angeles in 1915, was committed in 1930 and spent the last three decades...
...same complaints might be made about Clarke's Miracolo d'Amore, which is rescued by being exquisitely beautiful. Clarke usually credits a painter with inspiring her imagery. This time it is Tiepolo. But the ancient crone sweeping and cackling, the commedia dell'arte clowns, the quartet of nude women gently interweaving in a dance, the men employing a variety of bird noises, the eerily believable copulation between a girl and a skeleton also bring to mind Cocteau and Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Diaghilev. If more explicitly violent and more frequently nude than necessary, Miracolo is nonetheless a fitting tribute...
...ever begrudged the artist his success. Hockney is that rarity, a painter of strong talent and indefatigable industry who has never struck the wearisome pose of il maestro and has been grounded, throughout his career, in the bedrock of Yorkshire common sense. Self-mockery may not be his long suit, but Hockney is the least arrogant of men, and his achievement, uneven though it looks, is a distinguished one. It can be assayed in the retrospective of some 200 works -- paintings, prints, drawings, photocollages, stage designs -- that, having originally been put together by the Los Angeles County Museum...
...think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not, any more than it trivialized the work of that still underrated artist Raoul Dufy. At root, Hockney is popular because his work offers a window through which one's eye moves without strain or fuss into a wholly consistent world. That world has its cast of recurrent characters -- friends, lovers and family. Hockney's portraits of his parents, in particular, are full...