Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/article/turner-monet-twombly-later-paintings-tate-liverpool/
Painter Gary Wragg records his impressions of the recent exhibition Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings at Tate Liverpool.
Wragg writes: "I am fascinated by Twombly’s compulsion, shared with many recent and current painters, for urgency, here-ness, enveloping near-ness, and close-ness, beyond composition. Concomitant with science’s understanding of the expanding evolution and nature of the universe, I find it interesting to see how the mark-making of Turner, Monet and Twombly evolved successively bigger, nearer and more emphatically tactile from one to the other over the span of three centuries. Twombly’s application of paint is more splashy, gungy and physical than Monet’s, whereas Monet’s is more systematically flattened and emphasised across the surface than Turner’s. Nowadays bonkers erratic in your face scribblings and splashings or heightened-colour-flatness stems from a very real need for possession, for being thrown out, in and around, and gripped by a simultaneously in out of kilter connectivity. The spectator becomes a magnet catching the memory of fleeting sensations of being in the studio and has an empathy with the artist working directly with painting. The overriding power of making and resolution seems to arise in spirit as much as in feeling, in the hand; it is central to the experience of most of the paintings in this exhibition, that seem of their time yet as timeless as the first handprint in pigment on a cave wall, made forty seven thousand years ago."
Link to Post:
http://blog.phillipscollection.org/2012/07/27/the-pain-passes-but-the-beauty-remains/
Katherine Luer blogs about Pierre-Auguste Renoir's extraordinary drive to paint late in life and posts a video of Renoir painting in 1915.
She writes: "Renoir suffered from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis for [the] last three decades or so of his life. His hands were deformed, his joints severely damaged, and he was wheelchair-bound for most of his later years. He adapted his painting techniques to cope: his children or other assistants held his palettes, placed paintbrushes in his permanently curled fingers, and even moved his canvases underneath his paintbrush so that he could hold his arm still to reduce the pain."
Link to Post:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/103572/barnes-foundation-museum-philadelphia-painting-cezanne-matisse-renoir
On the occasion of the opening of the new Barnes Foundation musuem in Philadelphia, Jed Perl re-reads The Art of Painting and The Art of Renoir by Dr. Albert C. Barnes.
Both books, Perl writes "have a blunt, evangelical force; they’re textbooks dedicated to transcendent values, written at a time when Barnes, a friend and disciple of John Dewey, believed that an appreciation for art could really change a person’s life... Barnes was an apostle of formal values, pressing the American public to understand paintings not in terms of narrative and representation but in terms of the power of color and composition to provoke feeling and meaning... the more of Barnes you read, the more you will discover a formalism of rare power - an exploration of the many ways in which formal values reflect and refract the full range of human values."
Link to Post:
http://lacma.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/whistlers-etchings-an-art-of-suggestion/
Naoko Takahatake blogs about the exhibition Whistler’s Etchings: An Art of Suggestion at LACMA, on view through July 22, 2012.
Takahatake writes: "Whistler was disparaged as 'an artist of incomplete performance,' his Venice etchings having been 'done with a swiftness and dash that preclude anything like care and finish.'While many of the prints on view are indeed seemingly spontaneous in execution, at times resembling preliminary studies taken from life, Whistler continuously reworked his plates, fastidiously redefining details and often reinforcing areas of shading to compensate for the wear of the plate. His economy of means belies his great expense of labor."
Link to Post:
http://www.haberarts.com/2012/05/that-scandalous-umbrella/
John Haber visits the exhibition Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting at the Frick Collection, New York, on view through May 13, 2012.
Haber writes that in the painting The Umbrellas, Renoir "surrounded a family dressed for success with the broader shading of clouds, a woman's full-length dress, and a swarm of umbrellas behind her. Those broader fields of blue and gray now fill the picture. Streaked with lighter tones, they show Renoir at his most modern, almost like the color planes of Paul Cézanne. And the critics were on to something, for Renoir was never better than when he cast color theories to the winds and indulged in black. In Moulin de la Galette, blacks ripple through the picture almost like points of light."
Link to Post:
http://artinfo.com/news/story/796626/pioneering-impressionist-berthe-morisot-gets-her-first-serious-retrospective-in-70-years-in-paris
Grégory Picard reviews the Berthe Morisot Retrospective at the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, on view through July 1, 2012.
Picard writes that this is "the first large-scale Morisot retrospective since 1941... restores Morisot to a central position in art history and in the Impressionist movement, which is all too often limited to Monet, Degas, Renoir, and Manet. In a man's world, Morisot quickly made her mark with an oeuvre that fit into the Impressionist mold but was at the same time eminently free, with her own evanescent style, pastel shades, and languid, even melancholy, compositions, which almost always depicted women."
Link to Post:
http://www.nysun.com/arts/renoir-and-the-force-of-delicacy/87725/
Franklin Einspruch reviews the exhibition Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting on view at the Frick Collection, New York through May 13, 2012.
Einspruch writes: "Perhaps best of all is Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg), on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. This 1879 painting depicts young circus performers in gold-fringed outfits. One girl has collected oranges thrown to them in congratulations, while the other gestures as if winding up for a full bow. Subtle shifts of precision and softness throw the two figures not only into different spaces, but into slightly different times, with a slower universe around the closer figure. The artist's touch is perfect, his signature softness lending even the sawdust floor a luminous delicacy."
Link to Post:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/03/136592986/gustave-caillebotte-impressions-of-a-changing-paris
Susan Stamberg reports on painter Gustave Caillebotte's paintings of Napoleon III's 'modern' Paris. Unlike his contemporaries Stamberg reports that Caillebotte's paintings mourn the loss of the old Paris and the rise of the modern city. She also discusses Caillebotte's important role as a patron of impressionist painters including Monet and Renoir. His "art collection became what today is the crux of the Impressionist holdings at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris."
The exhibition The Caillebotte Brothers' Private World is on view until July 11, 2011 at the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.
Link to Post:
http://artcritical.com/2011/02/07/renoi/
Gael Mooney reflects on an exhibition of Late Renoir paintings at Hammer Galleries: "The works in this show possess a quiet and intimate beauty that contrasts with the fleeting gaiety of Renoir’s Impressionist period for which he is best known." In recent years, Mooney points out, Renoir's late work has re-emerged as a significant influence on subsequent artists "the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and Bonnard all of whom collected his work."
