Word: painterly
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...advisable when visiting the Morris Louis retrospective now on view at New York City's Museum of Modern Art to recall the claims made for this painter ten or 15 years ago. In such work, the art historian Michael Fried once wrote, "what is nakedly and explicitly at stake . . . is nothing less than the continued existence of painting as a high art." It contained "unimagined possibilities for the future of painting." One chews on this, moving from one sweetly august canvas to the next, enjoying the floods and diaphanous veils of color, the sheaves of burning stripes, the technical control...
...broad avenues framed in V perspectives of flowering plums and cherries is perhaps to sense a connection with Louis' late "Unfurleds" of 1960-61.) Yet despite his expertise, precision of feeling and taste, Morris Louis does not come out of this show looking like a great painter. What is left? A perfume; a visual buzz unlike any other -- and the persistent impression of small pictorial ideas writ large. But for what it is, the work can still offer intense pleasure to the eye while inadvertently reminding you that beauty, in art, is not enough...
...Tory values exemplified by most of the characters on both sides of the law. Miskin has risen from a council-flat childhood to an imitation of chic affluence. A visitor to her sterile, modern apartment notes it is in "dull, orthodox, ghastly, conventional good taste." Like a Renaissance painter, James mischievously slips in a small, sharp portrait of herself as a "buxom grandmother, noted for her detective stories, who gazed mournfully at the camera as if deploring either the bloodiness of her craft or the size of her advance...
Time and its offspring, movement, have fascinated some modern artists. Sculptors can build it straight into their work -- the last half of the 20th century is full of wind-, gravity- or motor-powered contraptions that range from the balletic (Alexander Calder) to the Rube Goldbergian (Jean Tinguely) -- but a painter has to deal with a still, flat surface. On it, there are two possibilities. The first is to try to render the movement of the object itself, as the futurists did with their racing cars, or the cartoonist does with his speed lines. Mostly this results in illustrations, straightforward...
...into photography? A painter's job, perhaps; or so it seemed to the English painter and stage designer David Hockney, 50 of whose photocollages are on view (through Nov. 9) at New York City's International Center of Photography. In a phrase as memorable for its injustice as its vividness, he once remarked that "photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops -- for a split second." But between 1981 and 1983 Hockney scarcely touched a paintbrush; irked by painter's block, he turned to photography...