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Oct 29: those English!
THOSE ENGLISH! I think of English art before the mid-19th Century or so as a decorous celebration of life of or from the viewpoint of the upper crust. When Constable’s Bishop (down in the lower left-hand corner–click to enlarge) looked around him and saw harvest wagons, I expect he saw something idyllic like the Gainsborough.…
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Oct. 22: Joke (or not)
JOKE (OR NOT) Years ago, passing through Philadelphia, coming around the corner into Center Square Plaza, I encountered “Clothespin” by the collaborative team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Forty-five feet tall. I thought, “That’s fine.” On one level it’s a joke, like their soft objects—the cheeseburgers, the instruments. But those are indoor objects.…
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October 15: pairing
PAIRING A drawing and a photo, very engaging side by side.
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October 8: holding the eye
HOLDING THE EYE The landscape work of Claude Lorrain was enormously influential from the mid-17th Century on. “Pastoral Landscape” is a typical example. On the right, a large, dark mass of trees with the bright figures in the lower corner. From there the eye follows their gestures and left-leaning body language, and the cows amble toward the lighter left…
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Oct. 1: Magritte’s elegance
MAGRITTE’S ELEGANCE Artists make formal choices to get certain results. Rene Magritte’s painting style can seem formulaic, almost mechanical, but the point of this restraint is to enable the surreality of his images. There is nothing to be gained, and much focus to be lost, by painterly bravura. Contrast the coherence of his “Rider in…
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Sept. 24: the way we live
THE WAY WE LIVE Many of the images we see in the papers and on the net are just snaps of stuff happening, but from time to time there are images which for one reason or another are striking and self-explanatory. I’ve taken to grabbing and dropping them into a folder labeled “the way we live”. It now has…
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Sept. 17: at sea
AT SEA Renaissance pictorial conventions are not necessarily the most effective for creating symbolic images. “St. Nicholas of Bari” by Gentile da Fabriano ( 1370-1427– i.e., pre-Renaissance) is a wildly irrational piece in its formal logic (floating as if in mist rather than water, the ladder and skiff in scale with the ship but the…
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September 10: “Girl With Gloves”
“GIRL WITH GLOVES” Some works of art are delightful even if they are less than great. This piece by Tamara de Lempicka (1898 – 1980), “Girl with Gloves” (1930) is one such. Lempicka’s work is all about style, and in her dedication to decorative boldness she is no slave to visual logic. Consider the shadows…
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Sept 3: glockenspiel delight
GLOCKENSPIEL DELIGHT If you’ve had occasion to look up “glockenspiel” in Wikipedia you won’t have missed this delicious photo of the instrument at Mardi Gras. You’d have to go back to The Wedding or the Gay Pride Parade to find anything quite up to it.
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August 27: dipping into SFMOMA
DIPPING INTO SFMOMA The newly expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibits a disappointing proportion of fashion-chasing dreck (Jeff Koons floating basketballs, ferheavenssake, and down from there), but there are some delights. Two examples: A gallery devoted to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, consisting of several groups of closely hung, identically framed photos…