Word: painters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With delight and gratitude, one hopes. Pollock was a great painter; at least he painted some great pictures, which changed the face of American art, and look as fresh and strong today as they must have 50 years ago, when they emerged from his shack of a studio on New York's Long Island. But how great is "great"? Meaning has drained out of the idea of greatness because today it is so inextricably confused with fame, and fame with celebrity, all on the dumb level of publicity--and Pollock is the most publicized and celebrated artist in American history...
American actors and baseball players had been this famous before and would be more so; Ernest Hemingway was, but no painter was or would be again--not even Andy Warhol. Eager to curate his own reputation, Pollock let photographers in and performed for them. Hans Namuth, Rudy Burckhardt and Arnold Newman saw a drama in Pollock's mating dance around the canvas on the floor that normally isn't present in a painter's address to his work. It was solipsistic and histrionic at the same time--broody like Brando, vulnerable like James Dean. Pollock's fate was pure stardom...
...Cody in 1912 was a new tract-housing development, not an Old West town. His father was a dud and a drifter who had little to do with his son. His ineffectual mother spoiled him. Mainly he was raised by older brothers, the eldest of whom, Charles, was a painter. At 16, Pollock was studying art in Los Angeles; two years later, he followed Charles to New York, where he found a serious teacher in Thomas Hart Benton, choleric dean of the American Regionalist movement...
...mediocre professional who knew, and sedulously imitated, the work of Claude Lorrain. But in Australia he did the best work of his life, celebrating the pastoral delights of land ownership and commemorating the Aborigines, whose way of life was being inexorably destroyed by white farmers like him. No painter in Australia ever committed himself as wholeheartedly to recording the life of Aborigines as, say, American artist George Catlin did to that of Indians. But Glover clearly meant The Last Muster of the Aborigines at Risdon, 1836, to be a muted elegy: those black figures, dwarfed by the huge and almost...
...there's a similarity between an American painter of sublime, theatrical Western scenery like Albert Bierstadt and an Australian one like the more modest Eugene von Guerard, it isn't accidental. Both received the same training at the Dusseldorf Academy and acquired skill at the tight, glossy, detailed rendering of grandiose scenes. Von Guerard joined the gold rush to Australia in 1852 but failed as a prospector, and made a career for 30 years painting two kinds of scenery: portraits of the settled acres of the well-to-do pastoralists; and views of more exotic wildness, from the bizarrely sculpted...