Word: painters
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...Gursky, similarly, is committed to cataloguing the structural artifice left behind by humanity. The pairing with Ruscha is a bit unusual, but it works. Despite differences in age, geographical origin and medium--Ruscha is an LA-based artist who got his start as a humble sign-painter in the '60s, while Gursky is a much younger, German-born photographer--the two engage with at times startlingly similar themes. In his images of endless hotel interiors, meticulously arranged 99-cent stores and cold Prada showrooms, Gursky, like Ruscha, presents everyday structures as pure expressions both of the human and something more...
Schama's heavy tome, some of whose content the author originally delivered as lectures at Harvard, makes every attempt to be a definitive work on the painter, and it succeeds. First and foremost it is a narrative of the life and work of Rembrandt van Rijn, although calling it a "biography" somehow sounds reductive. It is equal parts analysis of Rembrandt's painting, documentation of his life and history of 17th century Holland, so sections of the book can be read with profit by anyone studying the artist, his art or the social history of the times...
...times is largely a history of the Dutch fighting the Spanish, the Protestants at war with Catholics. In the arena of art, the focal conflict is the war between the Dutch Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, the most popular artist of the previous generation and a court painter of the Spanish Habsburgs. A good chunk of this thick, richly illustrated book is about Rubens' background and family; Rembrandt himself is barely mentioned for an entire chapter. Schama compares paintings and history to show the anxious influence at work between Rembrandt and his older, more popular precursor. Rembrandt, Schama says...
...enormous talent for portraiture. Early on he takes the monumentally cocky step of signing only his first name-no "van Rijn"-as if he knew his paintings would be studied for centuries to come. His understanding of humans and their personae was without parallel. Schama writes, "No painter would ever understand the theatricality of social life as well as Rembrandt. He saw the actors in men and the men in actors...
...Rembrandt's self-portraits. Schama reads Rembrandt's self-portraits in various costumes-as a merchant, as a soldier, for example-as indications of his elusiveness, as if each portrait were meant to conceal rather than reveal its subject. In analysis of one self-portrait, Schama writes that the painter "has disappeared inside his persona," inscrutable beyond the dead dark eyes of the painting. The artist's disguise hides his true self, and the critic is left to speculate. It seems that in this case Schama is grasping (as art historians must) at facts and attitudes that can never...