Word: stella
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Admittedly, the connection between Caravaggio's action-packed religious paintings and the geometric day-glo of Stella's enormous abstract works is pretty hard to see at first glance. But there is a connection, and you don't have to take my word for it. Stella himself has devoted 167 richly illustrated pages to drawing...
...text has been culled from the prestigious Norton Lectures which Stella delivered in 1982 and 1983. His argument is synopsized very nicely on the back of the volume...
...artists who followed Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian searched for new directions to advance their work from beneath the shadow of these great painters. Caravaggio pointed the way. So today, Stella believes, the successors to Picasso, Kandinsky and Pollock must seek a pictorial space as potent as the one Caravaggio developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century...
Despite his use of the art-crit lingo that is a hazard of the profession, the Andover-Princeton educated Stella does a fine job of explaining how Caravaggio's painting surpassed the tradition of trompe l'oeil--literally "fool the eye," meaning those paintings designed to be mistaken for real. Stella believes Caravaggio's greatest accomplishment was in his command of space, painting figures that not only look three-dimensional, but seem to expand out of the front and back of the canvas...
Working Space is unusually reader-friendly. Almost every painting Stella mentions has been conveniently reproduced for the reader's study, a practice that should be made mandatory for all books about...