Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-ground-with-cezanne.html
Kyle Gallup writes about Cézanne's Card Players on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 8, 2011. Gallup writes: "Viewing 'Cezanne’s Card Players' exhibit currently at the Metropolitan Museum was like visiting with a dear friend. The show renewed my thinking about Cezanne’s painting, and... I appreciate anew the totality of his vision"
Submitted by Brett Baker on February 23, 2011
"If, when the eye is impressed with visionary images that last for a while, we look on colored surfaces, an intermixture also takes place; the spectrum is determined to a new colour..." Goethe, Theory of Colours
In New York, in February 2011, the diverse possibilities of painting are alive and filling the galleries and museums.
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/on-chicago-abstraction-a-series/
John Neff examines at abstraction in Chicago. He writes: "For a long time, Chicago art has been strongly identified with an eccentric and often grotesquely or humorously distorted variety of figure painting... but it’s not the whole story of painting in Chicago." Neff looks at the work of several painters including Robert Nickle, Holt Quentel, Julia Fish and Michelle Grabner.
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/notable-painters/louis-finkelstein-on-painterly
In another must read blog post Larry Groff pairs great images of Louis Finkelstein's paintings with writings about the artist including a conversation between Harry Naar and Finkelstein that is not to be missed.
An excerpt: Finkelstein: "The possible variations built into the nature of painting are, in a way, parallel to the way recombining words yields so many different meanings, even whole vistas of meaning. Through the recombining of elements and relations, paintings produce in us various emotions, affects, reminiscences which we would not have without them, and these are not used up any more than poetry is used up."
Link to Post:
http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/30
Saul Ostrow looks at a group of works by painter Don Dudley made in Los Angeles before the artist moved east to New York. The works were part of the recent exhibition Don Dudley at I-20 Gallery, the artist's first solo show in 25 years. Ostrow puts Dudley's works of the mid 60's in context with the concerns of Los Angeles artists at the time. Although Dudley pursued other directions in his painting after relocating to New York, the Ostrow writes that from the LA works " one gets the sense of an important course within Minimalism as well as abstract painting that has gone unacknowledged and unexplored. "
Link to Post:
http://philipkochpaintings.blogspot.com/2011/02/true-grit.html
Artist Philip Koch finds inspiration in the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz. Koch looks at Kollwitz's images of women as well as her illustrations for humanitarian posters. He describes an image of an old woman: "she is both incredibly solid and volumetric and at the same time is presented to us through the most elegant flat shapes that thread their way across the whole composition."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/post_1691_b_819376.html
As part of his blog series about slow looking James Elkins ponders the "ferociously difficult" question of when a painting is finished. He examines 'unfinished' paintings from a number of painters including Parmigianino, Cezanne, and de Kooning "map[ing] out three of the fundamental ways that paintings can be unfinished, because thinking about how something is unfinished is just a little clearer than thinking about how it's finished."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/landscape-painting/gretna-campbell
A thorough look at the life and work of painter Gretna Campbell. Working from the landscape, Campbell was a plein-air painter "at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement... The novelty of her painting, mostly landscape, was that it was large enough to incorporate a solid and specific structure associated with studio painting, but worked out and finished directly on the spot-an approach hitherto linked to the improvised sketch."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2011/02/against-american-exceptionalism.html
Altoon Sultan calls well-deserved attention to an alternative cannon of 19th Australian and Danish landscape painters. She writes: "Luminism was defined as a peculiarly American painting style. But really, it's not; I disagree with Novak who calls it "one of the most truly indigenous styles in the history of American art."
Link to Post:
http://whitney.org/WatchAndListen/Artists?context=&context_id=&play_id=318
[VIDEO] The newly launched Watch and Listen website from the Whitney Museum is a repository for videos and audio podcasts from the museum. Among the featured videos is "a two-part video of the exhibition, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, curated by artist Robert Gober." This link is to part one.
