Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/starry-night-starless-night.html
In this excellent post Charles Kessler blogs the conversation between Charles Garabedian's painting Starless Night (2009) and Van Gogh's Starry Night. Although technical similarities are in evidence, Kessler notes that "their subject matter couldn’t be more different. The Van Gogh, of course, is about the awesome power of God or nature ... Garabedian’s subject, on the other hand, is about man-made ruination." Here Kessler discovers Garabedian's painting engaging in another conversation, this time in the "ordinariness" of the violence depicted, "like the soldiers executing prisoners in Goya's Third of May."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/notable-painters/gabriel-laderman-1929-2011
Larry Groff publishes a tribute to painter Gabriel Laderman (1929-2011). Groff writes "Laderman was a significant representational painter and teacher and was instrumental in the revival of figurative art in the 1960s. He studied with a number of leading American painters, including Hans Hofmann, de Kooning, and Rothko." The post includes images of Laderman's landscape, figure, and still life paintings as well as excerpts from articles by Jed Perl and Lincoln Perry.
Link to Post:
http://www.3pipe.net/2011/03/lavinia-fontana-and-female-self.html
Monica Bowen guest posts on 3 Pipe Problem blog about Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana. Bowen writes: "Since Renaissance women weren't always in control of how they were portrayed in art (women were often depicted by male artists), I like to see how a female artist represented herself when she did have control over her image."
Link to Post:
http://www.tnr.com/article/the-picture/85270/gabriel-laderman-painter
Jed Perl remembers painter Gabriel Laderman who passed away last week at the age of 81. Perl's piece conveys a portrait of a man who championed painting as a means of personal discovery. The following passage by Perl is worth quoting in full:
"What [Laderman] offered to those who were willing to look and to listen was the splendor of artistic possibility. If young artists told him they loved fourteenth-century Sienese painting, he would tell them to look at it longer and harder and make it their own. He believed you could learn from nineteenth-century caricatures, from sixteenth-century Mannerist engravings, from nineteenth-century Japanese landscape paintings, from Mondrian, from Phidias, from anything and everything. But you didn’t just pick something up and use it. This was no postmodern game. You embraced it, you struggled with it, you transformed it, you made it your own. And in the process you transformed yourself as an artist."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/the-most-beautiful-painti_b_833672.html
Art historian James Elkins writes about Giovanni Bellini's Ecstasy of St. Francis in the Frick Collection. The Bellini painting, Elkins writes, is "the painting that means the most to me." Elkins' post focuses on images of the painting, details captured from the Google Art Project, rather than written analysis. He mourns the fact that although the painting was important to him initially the "miracles have drained out of it" wrecked by "the poison well of scholarship."
Link to Post:
http://blog.tate.org.uk/?p=3252
Silke Otto-Knapp, a contemporary artist whose work is included in Watercolour at Tate Britain, discusses Samuel Palmer's watercolor painting A Hilly Scene, (1826-1828). "The painting exists somewhere between the visionary aspirations of Palmer’s imagination and a realistic depiction of a familiar place."
Otto-Knapps article is taken from the article Colour Me British, a more in-depth look at works from the exhibition published in Tate Etc. magazine. Images from Watercolour were also featured in this slideshow from The Guardian.
Link to Post:
http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/a-new-york-minute/
Deborah Barlow takes a look at painting in the Chelsea galleries this month. Her visit "offered up some moments worth remembering" including Pat Steir at Cheim and Read, Joan Mitchell at Lenon Weinberg, Herb Jackson at Claire Oliver, Tara Donovan at Pace, and José Parlá at Bryce Wolkowitz. She also crosses the river to check out Filiz Emma Soyak at Giacobetti Paul Gallery in DUMBO.
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2011/03/danish-golden-age-figure-painting.html
Altoon Sultan recounts her discovery of figure paintings and portraits from the Danish Golden Age. She writes: "During this period in the first half of the 19th century there was an outpouring of beautiful, sensitive, and rather modest painting." Her post examines paintings by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Constantin Hansen, Christen Købke, and Wilhelm Marstrand.
Link to Post:
http://www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts/2011/03/motesiczky-unveiled.html
Judith H. Dobrzynski discovers the work of Marie-Louise Motesiczky, subject of a recent exhibition at Galerie St. Etienne, at the ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory. Motesiczky was praised by her teacher Max Beckman but her work has not been well known. It is on of the special moments in painting when the work of an interesting painter, overlooked by art history, emerges decades later, looking fresh and relevant and speaking to a new generation of painters and viewers.
Link to Post:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/03/artseen/hard-edgeness-in-american-abstract-painting
Robert C. Morgan notes a re-emergence of hard-edge abstract painting. "Based on a few recent exhibitions in New York," he writes, "it would appear that traces of both the large and the modest variety of this hard-edge approach to painting are reappearing in a variety of forms." Morgan looks at work from artists such as Harvey Quaytman, Charles Hinman, Tadasky, and Laurie Fendrich among others.
