Word: painterly
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Hodgkin is 50 this year: a diffident man with a tough, discursive mind and a long background in art history, collecting and teaching. There is not a more educated painter alive, and it would be hard to think of one whose erudition was more exactly placed at the disposal of feeling. His paintings look abstract but are full of echoes of figures, rooms, sociable encounters; they are small, "unheroic" but exquisitely phrased. The space they evoke is closed, artificial, without horizon or other legible references to landscape. One seems to be looking into a box full of colored flats...
...arcane sort. But they seem casually, even inattentively deployed, coming out not as formal homages to this or that master but as a function of temperament. Like Bonnard, whose work he reveres, Hodgkin is a fidgety peeper into secular paradises and controllable realms of pleasure. But as befits a painter who makes no bones about his belief in the continuity of past and present, part of the pleasure lies in the conversation between his work and its sources...
...Painter Alex Katz's subtle and delicate cover portrait perfectly records the rare qualities of John Updike: never jaded, always new, alive, intelligent and marvelously controlled...
...idea of a uniform corporate look originated in Germany before World War I. Its pioneer was AEG, the nationwide electric company, which began as a manufacturer of light bulbs, soon made electric appliances and, by 1928, controlled mines, railroads, rolling mills and airplane plants. Peter Behrens, a painter, graphic artist and architect, who also gained a reputation as a designer of type faces and industrial products, created AEG's distinct, although by now somewhat antiquated rendition of its initials...
Realist painting is now such an accepted fact of American art that one almost forgets how many of its best practitioners were once abstract painters, converted in midcareer. Philip Pearlstein, Sidney Tillim, Alfred Leslie, William Bailey: they all came, in one way or another, out of abstract expressionism, making the change not from opportunism-15 or 20 years ago, practically no collectors or museums were exempt from the tyranny of abstract art-but out of a sense of lost engagement with the physical world and a hunger to recomplicate the game. Yet the past leaves its genetic code...