Word: ryders
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...trice, turn a drab hairdo into a chic coiffure and sculpt front-yard bushes into exotic topiary: ballerinas, pterodactyls, even a group portrait of the all-suburban family. And how pleased Edward is to be a guest of this brood -- especially since it includes teenage Kim (Winona Ryder), to < whom Edward will give his love as soon as he stops giving her the creeps...
...when every suburban house could be a quiet riot of coordinated pastels. But the film exists out of time -- out of the present cramped time, certainly -- in the any-year of a child's imagination. That child could be the little girl to whom the grandmotherly Ryder tells Edward's story nearly a lifetime after it took place. Or it could be Burton, a wise child and a wily inventor, who has created one of the brightest, bittersweetest fables of this or any-year...
...then there was the dirt. In the late 19th century, when curators were presumably less anal than they are today, dirt was considered a positive adjunct of museum art; it lent mellowness and venerability. Ryder's studio was filthy, a pack rat's cave. "It is appalling, this craze for clean-looking pictures," he once complained. "Nature isn't clean." To distinguish between the dirt, the dust, the brown varnish, the pigmented glazes and the goo underneath and then to stabilize the surface to preserve some notion of Ryder's intentions have always been a conservator's nightmare...
Only the paintings with the strongest tonal structure have remained altogether legible, and most of these are the marines. Images like Moonlight (which he actually painted on board ship, returning from a trip to Europe) go far beyond the self-conscious poeticism that infests so much of Ryder's work. They are diminutive in size but large in scale. Thick darkness and eerie light turn in the sky; the sea heaves, scattered with moon flakes and endowed with a Courbet-like solidity. "My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,/ Is driven, I know not whither" -- Vittoria...
Albert Pinkham Ryder had visionary gifts but also, a new show reveals, feeble draftsmanship, overblown poeticism and techniques that have caused his canvases to deteriorate disastrously...