Word: temperas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Painter Zerbe set out to find a new medium. The answer was polymer tempera, a plastic mixture developed by one of Zerbe's former students at the Boston Museum's art school. Polymer tempera is made by mixing polyvinyl acetate, a bland white plastic (which is also used as a binder for paper diapers), with softener and ammonia. The result is a fast-drying medium as easy to handle as gouache but with as much body as oil. Last week 16 of Zerbe's new plastic paintings were on view at Manhattan's Alan Gallery. Painter...
Seen across a room, the picture looked rather like an abstraction. Somber in color, it had a surging quality as unsettling as any work by such abstract expressionists as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. A closer look justified the big tempera's title-Field Gate. In the foreground were two rickety gateposts, from which a faintly discernible path looped up and away over a vast, snow-swept hillside rising to an eerily shifting, storm-filled sky. Meticulously building this wide, wild scene, grass blade by grass blade, Wyeth suggested the looming forces of nature in an impassioned portrait...
...Indian painters stick to the brutally, sensuous Brahman school of temple art or turn out dreamy, idealized mythological figures. But almost all ignore India's primitive, bold village art. Not so Jamini Roy, who has drawn much inspiration from it and combined it with a slick modernity. His tempera panels show village girls, Bengali dancers, mothers and children, such scenes as Gosto, the flute-playing God of Love, and his friends tending the cows, all of them almost toylike figures with flat, stylized bodies and immense almond eyes...
Before Antonello, the great Italian painters had worked with tempera, i.e., opaque water color. Mixed with egg white and applied to mirror-smooth panels with the points of tiny brushes, tempera has a brilliance and precision that oils can never match. But oils are far more fluent. They can be laid atop one another in transparent glazes to produce a glowing vibrancy akin to that of colors in nature. They can be blurred into shadow, and they can be broadly, loosely, quickly or gently brushed, in imitation of the flooding sparkle of light itself. Antonello preached this technique by example...
Most interesting of the lot was a 38-year-old ex-abstractionist named Edward Melcarth, who paints mural-size canvases of factories and workmen, using one of the Renaissance's favorite materials, egg tempera. Painter Melcarth has his eye on what he hopes is a potential new market for art: U.S. labor unions. He plans to ship off canvases to various union headquarters around the country and invite the members to pay him whatever they think his paintings are worth. In San Francisco, the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union now has before...