Word: vermeer
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Visually, The Nun's Story is almost dazingly beautiful. The colors are rich and sensuous, the light innocent and cool; and when light and color play together on the medieval stones of Bruges or Brussels, the screen glows like an awakened frame of old Vermeer. Dramatically, the film has been admirably conceived and impressively executed. Religiously, it is rather shallow. There is merit in the picture's painstaking effort to convey the physical reality of convent life, but somewhere the spiritual reality is lost. The radiant pageant of devotion ravishes the senses, but it does not touch...
...value the lights that men and artists live by. Light is the sensuous hero of Sight and Insight: "Velásquez' light is like transparent golden bees swarming the honeyed shadow, while Rogier van der Weyden's is like water over marble . . . even when stealing into Vermeer's darkest interior by a narrow window, light is welcomed as a lover. The far corners whisper hello to light. Instead of humping their backs like angry cats the shadows under the furniture are purring. A lady smooths a tablecloth: light smooths it for her and gently holds her hand...
Other standouts range from ARP (Museum of Modern Art; $4.50) to VERMEER (Phaidon; $10). Oriental art gets a lion's share of publishers' attention, with 2000 YEARS OF JAPANESE ART (Abrams; $25) and CHINESE PAINTING (Universe; $10) among the handsomest efforts. Pelican Books offers a monumental study, ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY: 1600-1750, for $12.50. Collins has a NEW TESTAMENT (de luxe, $50) exquisitely illustrated with tipped-in reproductions from medieval manuscripts, and Praeger a compendium of ARTISTS' TECHNIQUES ($12.50). New York Graphic provides a large Henry Moore sketchbook of HEADS, FIGURES AND IDEAS...
...rest of the magazine is poetry, and of it I like Sandy Kaye's "Afternoon Thoughts in Delft" best. It is a simple and tranquil poem, the best kind, and Sandy Kaye's piece seems to have an uncommon fragility about it. A lady sits in a doorway of Vermeer's "Street in Delft," thinking of the quiet and the secure things she knows about her faded old home. The poem is the woman talking, and yet it is not the woman talking because her thought seems to transcend her feeling. Be sure to hunt up the print...
...interesting to note that the number of outraged letters you are receiving on abstract impressionist art is increasing. Why can't the general public recognize that we are never again going back to painting like Rembrandt, Vermeer and Rubens-or even to Watteau, Poussin and Renoir? I commend you heartily on your display of contemporary art, but let's tell your readers the startling fact that it is here to stay...