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“Sunset at Montmajour” certainly looks like the work of Vincent Van Gogh, but when in the early 20th Century it was dismissed as a fake, its owner stuck it in the attic. There it sat for the next sixty years. Now it’s out, and after two years of learned study it’s acclaimed as the genuine…

                      The estimable George Stubbs (1724-1806) made his reputation on his paintings of horses. Many of these feature what was known as a “rubbing-down house,” an interesting background detail common to the environment of upper-class horses. Except that in Stubb’s work the house is often…

  We learn, sometimes, in the most unexpected places—in this case, from the memoir of Eric Hebborn, a saucy and unapologetic forger of old master drawings.* His art education, in England in the ‘50s, was of the most academic sort, and his first job was in the workshop of an art restorer where “restoration” could…

Duane Hanson (1925-96) did many hyper-realist figure pieces, usually in groups or poses that are designedly foreign to the gallery spaces where they are shown. Striking, then, is his wonderful “slab man” at the Cantor Art Center at Stanford. The figure stands in the contemporary gallery so that visitors have to maneuver around it. I…

The show of figure drawings presently on view at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford University campus includes a number of delights.  Some of them, like this Francoise Boucher (1703 – 1770), are the sort of thing you expect in a survey show, but that doesn’t diminish the delight. It’s one of those silly…

This blog will be on vacation for a few peaceful summer weeks. In the meantime, enjoy “The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks (1780-1849). This is such a familiar piece that it’s hard to look at carefully,  but it repays the effort. Hicks was a Quaker minister with strong views of how the world ought to…

Fans of Richard Diebenkorn (1922-93) will find many wonderful pieces in “Diebenkorn: the Berkeley Years” now showing at the DeYoung in San Francisco. Also many that are somewhat less than wonderful. Diebenkorn’s work typically exudes energy and a determination not to be pat. Generally that works well for him; at other times the focus on…

Pieter Janz. Saenredam (1597-1665) is admired for the breathtaking (and improbable) light in his wonderful interiors. In St. Anne, below, the image is largely held in light middle tones so that the dark, sprightly figures along the bottom command the space. That is masterful; but then he tied himself to a mechanical one-point perspective where…

The essential skill of cartoonists lies in presenting a visual setup so that it can be comprehended at a glance. The more adept they are in this, the easier it is to miss their formal strength–because I get it at once, ha ha, and move on. Why linger? Unhappily, a cartoon’s transparency becomes a lost…

Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883) and Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) aren’t two artists I normally associate with one another, but the two pieces here, while very unlike in effect, are so similar in pose and detail that I have to wonder if the one is a cheeky quotation of the other. The Manet is a…