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Madame Cezanne
“MADAME CEZANNE” One of the fascinations of the prime work of Paul Cezanne is how he builds his compositions by a process of minute discovery. A new book, Cezanne Portraits by John Elderfield, is full of wonderful examples. “Madame Cezanne” is one. It’s instructive to compare Cezanne’s execution with Edouard Manet’s in a work of similar…
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Sheeler’s Lines
SHEELER’S LINES I had seen Charles Sheeler’s work before, but it was only while pondering several of his things in “The Cult of the Machine”, the show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, that I noticed his systematic use of fine black lines around almost all his shapes. You’d think such a mechanical device would…
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The Economy of Magritte
THE ECONOMY OF MAGRITTE Rene Magritte (1898 – 1967) was an adroit painter, but his best work is not given to painterly luxuriance. His images revolve around their surrealistic joke, and the more simply and directly the point is made, the better. Imagine “The Son of Man” as richly composed and modeled as “Alfred Flechtheim.”…
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Schnabel at the Legion
SCHNABEL AT THE LEGION A saucy challenge often underlies cultural fashion: This isn’t blowhard nonsense, it’s the New Real Thing! Don’t you get it? For example, “Julian Schnabel: Symbols of Actual Life” at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Coming into the courtyard you are confronted by six 24-foot-square canvases (all titled…