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April 27: nothing: it’s a concept
On Friday afternoons the sculpture majors at my art school would gather for the weekly critique. Sometimes it was very cozy; one of the graduate students would put up a piece that we all knew he’d been working on, and knew would be good. We’d spend ten or fifteen minutes smiling and nodding and agreeing…
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April 20: boldness (Matisse again)
Matisse again. Part of his strength as an artist is that he doesn’t sweat the little glitches and infelicities that would drive someone less confident to go back and tweak this and that until the whole thing was reduced to bland decoration. For example, his portrait of Sarah Stein. The colors are dull. The blacks,…
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April 13: Rembrandt’s narrative attitude
Before considering narrative style in the etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), it’s useful to establish a base of comparison. Here we’ll use a piece by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). The point is that Goltzius works out his forms in full, and is consistent throughout the piece: everything he shows, important or not, gets the…
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April 6: a favorite: Ensor’s “Expulsion”
James Ensor (1860-1949) is best known for ebullient mindscapes such as “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889”, full of caricatures and wacky juxtapositions. But I do love his “Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise,” painted two years before (at the age of twenty-seven!). As narration, it’s pretty standard; you have your angel in the…