Word: painterly
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Eric Fischl has become the painter laureate of American anxiety in the '80s. From the moment he exhibited Sleepwalker, 1979, his image of a teenage boy resentfully masturbating in a suburban wading pool, Fischl has zeroed in with unblinking curiosity on the discontents of the White Tribe whose territory stretches from Scarsdale to Anaheim: unreachable kids, grotesque parents, small convulsions of voyeurism and barely concealed incestuous longing...
...Susann's attorney, Louis Nizer, after she filed suit. Capote went on to praise Nizer's own letter to him as well written: "If only your client . . . had your sense of style!" Susann took this badly and caricatured Capote in her novel Dolores as Horatio Capon, a gossipy painter who resembled a "blondish...
...legend was helped by other people's fictions, though Gauguin's own existential posturings as hero, Christ-martyr, magus, savage and artist-criminal lay at its root. For many, the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is still the "real" Gauguin -- a stockbroker and Sunday painter who cracks out of the bourgeois egg, dumps his wife, family and career and hightails it to Tahiti to "find himself" among the breasts and breadfruit. He is part brute and part escape artist, the Houdini of the avant-garde...
Such an image of Gauguin, as Stuckey and Brettell show by exhaustive research, is mostly moonshine. The brute of fiction was not only a superbly intelligent painter but also a writer who left, as Brettell points out, the "largest and most important body of texts, illustrated and otherwise, produced by any great artist in France since . . . Delacroix . . . That he has always been treated as a businessman-turned-artist rather than an artist- turned-writer shows the extent to which his literary achievement has been undervalued...
...story of self-creation told by the early work is just as surprising as anything in his Tahitian years. By 1880 the Sunday painter in his 30s had become a tardy impressionist, imitating Pissarro's landscapes and Mary Cassatt's moppets. After ten years of work in Paris, Brittany and with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin was making his first real masterpieces, like The Ham, 1889, a still life that pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants...