Word: painterly
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Eakins is the greatest realist painter America has so far produced. He never successfully idealized a subject. When theatrical, which he rarely was, he tended to look silly. He was pragmatic, cussed, inquisitive, thoroughgoing, relentlessly observant, and plain of pictorial speech: a Yankee to the last finger bone. He was so in love with the specific that one scholar managed to compute, from the sun's angle, the time and date of the scene depicted in one of his paintings of rowers training on the Schuylkill, The Pair-Oared Shell; they went under the bridge, give or take...
...appears on the screen is a highly evolved creature. One special-effects crew tried to make the spaceman and failed, spending a reported $700,000 in the process. Then Spielberg turned to Carlo Rambaldi, an Italian painter and sculptor. Rambaldi first came to the U.S. in 1975 as a consultant on King Kong, then in 1978 set up a small shop in Los Angeles. He explained the construction of E.T. to TIME'S Joseph Pilcher, beginning with sketches and a series of clay models for screen testing for Spielberg before building the creature. Finally, Rambaldi made an aluminum...
...fountain toppling behind him. Altogether too much of the exhibition is pulpy with triviality. Ontani, who dresses in historical costume or mythological nudity and has himself photographed (not only as Dante, but as Christopher Columbus, Don Giovanni and even Leda), is a natural clown. But as a painter he is fatuous, and his watercolors, full of Donald Ducks and magic mushrooms, would have looked dumb on Haight-Ashbury 15 years ago, let alone in New York today...
...major painter? Of course not; he is a salon wit. Cliche piles on cliche...
...doppelgangers and harsh schematic landscapes-are elaborately ill-painted in order to support the fiction of terminal earnestness. This, of course, is the main trick in the repertory of neo-expressionist effects, and Cucchi does it over and over again. The best of his paintings here, The Mad Painter, 1981-82, seems to parody this condition; the rest simply deploy their accepted rhetoric of crudity as vitality. Artists of Cucchi's persuasion, wild pets for the super-cultivated, serve many useful ends. One is the recycling of old 1950s adjectives. "Primeval," "raw," "overpowering," "harsh"-here they are again, ready...