[VIDEO] Clyfford Still: A Life in Paintings featuring painter Bill Jensen discussing his own discovery of Clyfford Still’s work. Produced and directed by A bark K Productions and the Milkhaus
Discussing the documentary in a recent article in NYArts Magazine Collins noted: "I began with a person whom I already knew: Joseph Marioni, a painter perpetuating the High Modernist tradition of his predecessors. Once I talked with him, I came away with many ideas that multiplied. Though De Antonio was already well acquainted with his group of participants, I would be learning about mine for the first time while filming, which is an experience I have come to enjoy. There's nothing like sitting with someone and hearing the story of his or her life firsthand."
Kent Minturn undertakes and in-depth examination of Clyfford Still's thesis on Cézanne and the clues it provides to Still's early and later development as an artist.
Minturn notest that "In his thesis Still eloquently emphasizes Cézanne’s 'tactual' application of paint and takes pains to describe the way his predecessor 'feels' his way around his forms. Cézanne and Still similarly dismantle Albertian perspective by giving equal emphasis to figure and ground... Although Still points out that one of Cezanne’s 'most important contributions to the evolution of modern art' was his ability 'to realize form in color rather than make color look like form,' he does not argue that one of these plastic elements is subordinate to the other. Rather, he situates them on equal footing and demonstrates the extent to which color and form are inextricably intertwined in Cézanne’s praxis."
Tyler Green interviews Craig Harbison, author of the recently revised monograph Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism. Green notes that the book is "a too-rare example of a top art historian willing to allow his sense of wonder at his subject’s work to infuse every page."
Green also interviews Ron Spronk, coordinator for the Closer to van Eyck on-line project which provides macro-photographic images of the Ghent Alterpiece. Green writes that this new "documentation should help historians solve one of art history's greatest mysteries: Which parts of the altarpiece were painted by Hubert van Eyck before he died, and which parts were painted by his brother Jan?."
An extensive 2009 history of Mark Rothko's life and work in Portland, Oregon by Arcy Douglass; posted here on the occasion of the Mark Rothko Retrospective exhibition on view at the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon through May 17, 2012.
Douglass' reasearch examines "the time that Mark Rothko had spent in Portland and what implications, if any, it might have had on his mature work." The post includes a detailed account of Rothko's childhood and includes curiosities such as Doubon's Bride, a short story Rothko wrote at age 16.
Leslie Anderson blogs about Paul Gauguin's Still Life with Profile of Laval, known as a Freundschaftsbild, a picture exchanged between artists to "demonstrate friendship and, often, artistic allegiance."
Anderson cites "evidence that van Gogh proposed a portrait exchange to foster the Gemeinschaft (sense of community) between himself and fellow artists Gauguin, Laval, and Émile Bernard... These portraits, which are rendered in new artistic idioms, announce the painters’ collective denial of naturalism and simultaneous entrée into the international Symbolist movement."
Inspired by a visit to the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, Rebecca Harp muses on the paintings of Bruegel.
Harp writes: " I am not sure if there is anything quite like coming across a Bruegel painting when visiting a museum, being both very poignant and invigorating for the eye and mind at the same time. There are times when I am just exhausted from seeing so many famous paintings and crumbling fragments and “formal concerns.” Coming across a panel of such perfectly sustained, fragrant colors that are hundreds of years old, with so many details to linger over and a continually relevant life theme to ponder, is perhaps art absorption at its dearest and finest."
Leslie Anderson blogs about Edward Hopper's inclusion in the 1952 Venice Biennale. She notes that the positive reception of Hopper's work in Europe may be linked to an existing contemplative tradition in European painting beginning with Jan Vermeer and including Hopper's near contemporary, Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi.
Anderson quotes Stuart Preston of The New York Times who noted, in his review of the 1952 Biennale, that of the Americans represented "Hopper made the deepest impression. Foreigners recognized, and rightly, something authentically American in the pathos of his landscapes, a germ of loneliness..."
Gallagher writes: "This show intends to restore Lippi's well-deserved reputation as one of the most innovative and accomplished Renaissance painters. His works are interspersed among those of Botticelli, Raffaellino del Garbo, and Piero di Cosimo allowing the visitor to make sober comparisons. What immediately stands out is the soft, dense fullness of Filippino's pictures made with the lightest and most transparent of brushstrokes. This remarkable effect was in large part due to Lippi’s generous use of oil-fortified tempera on wood panel."
Caleb De Jong reviews Ingres at the Morgan on view at the Morgan Library, New York through November 27, 2011.
De Jong writes: "Seventeen drawings in the Library's holdings and three letters are displayed in a single, focused, crystalline room... As direct and immediate as any drawing made in the history of the practice, Ingres portraits, nudes and landscapes mark time with each pencil line... Cumulatively, the constellation of marks stands for a unit of time spent looking and drawing."
