Word: painterly
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John Tremont, 52, an American-born painter living in France, flies to Los Angeles after learning of his mother's heart attack. He finds her in a serious but stable condition; his father worries him more. At age 72, Dad has sunk into a lethargy that borders on inertia. Tremont sets him some routine household chores, then coaxes him into the outside world, and the old man begins to show sparks of vitality: "You get in the habit of working and then forget how to have fun." After a minor operation, however, Dad slides into senility. Tremont brings...
...Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is about 35 years late in coming to Manhattan; but in this case, better late than never. No such comprehensive view of German art has ever been set before an American public; from the romantic visions and esoteric metaphors of painters like Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich in the first decades of the 19th century, to the robust dash and splash of Lovis Corinth at its end, there are 150 works by 30 artists, and they help fill a gaping hole in our sense of the actual patterns of European...
...exhibition offers that desire in all its facets. It shows itself to spectacular effect in the obsessed, lyrical mysticism of Runge, a painter who was perhaps the closest equivalent to William Blake that Germany ever produced. In Runge the world is imagined in extreme detail, near and far, as a sort of metaphysical machine, a generator of intricate meanings about the life of the universe: birth, death, renewal, metamorphosis. His ambition (never fulfilled) was to do a cycle of religious murals, Four Times of Day; they would be installed in a special chapel and would form, Runge hoped, the nucleus...
...letter of 1535 in which Pope Paul III hires "our beloved son, Michelangelo" as architect, sculptor and painter for the unfinished church of St. Peter's. As part payment, the Pope grants the young painter all the tolls from a Po River ferry crossing near Piacenza for life...
...present everything Gorky touched as though it were a major statement. Curator Waldman's laudable aim has been to present Gorky's career as a continuous unfolding rather than a plagiarizing apprenticeship followed by a sudden "second birth" into originality. One is grateful to see the painter whole, but one wearies of sentences like, "The drawings are superb, yet the paintings that followed ... are even more extraordinary." These canonizations of the Self-Martyred Master (an Armenian-American Van Gogh, in effect) have an anesthetic effect. One senses that Gorky's hesitations and failures were as essential...