Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/08/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-smee-auping/
Sabastian Smee and Michael Auping discuss artist Lucian Freud with Tyler Green.
Asked how American's might relate to Freud's work, Auping comments: "Freud doesn't follow a modernist narrative. American art really was the great tail end of the modernist narrative… Freud doesn't fit that narrative at all. He's working in a genre that's the most ancient genre, portraiture, and the Egyptians did portraits. So when Williem de Kooning is painting his Woman I and then moving from Woman I into abstract landscapes, Freud is looking at a book of Egyptian face paintings and carvings and then he's beginning to make these very realistic portraits of heads that partly come out of his interest in Egyptian portraiture, but also an intense interest in Durer, and Durer's sense of detail… So there's this odd combination of minimalism and intense realism..."
Lucian Freud: Portraits is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas through October 28, 2012.
Link to Post:
http://idiommag.com/2012/07/the-freudian-eye/
One year after the death of painter Lucian Freud - a year filled with exhibitions and tributes - Julian Cosma considers Freud's legacy.
Cosma writes: "There is an unsavory but persistent question that hangs around the neck of Freud's legacy: would he have been as renowned if his grandfather what not founded modern day psychoanalysis? Questions like this are inevitable, however, they come with there own pregnant version of an uncertainty principle. One could never give a dispassionate answer. However, it would not be impertinent to suggest that between Freud fils and Freud grand-père, a plausible case could be for, if not parity, at least a recognition that more penetrating insight was not necessarily gained from the patients laying on the Viennese sofa. Sometimes, it was on the deliciously ratty maroon divan, in London, where the greatest creations of the Freudian came into fruition."
Link to Post:
http://heddyabramowitz.blogspot.com/2012/05/making-his-mark-frank-auerbach-at.html
Heddy Abramowitz reviews the exhibition Frank Auerbach: Portraits on Paper at the Israel Museum, on view through August 25, 2012.
Abramowitz writes: "As is typical of his paintings, [Auerbach's] drawings often show many layers of built-up re-workings until there is a dense mangle of lines, each mark thought through, erased and re-considered until he is satisfied... His working process results in portraits that are both an expression of his reaction to the sitter, and his own idiosyncratic way of working, creating, destroying, and creating anew."
Link to Post:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jun/09/jenny-saville-painter-modern-bodies
Rachel Cooke visits the studio of painter Jenny Saville whose work is on view at Modern Art Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from June 23 - September 16, 2012.
Cooke writes: "...out of the corner of my eye, I see it. A portrait: a woman, her neck at a difficult angle, her head tipped back, her unseeing eyes a pair of cloudy marbles (I know without being told that the model who sat for this work is blind). Now I'm not so cosy. The trick of the painting, the reason it is so hard to pull one's gaze from it, lies with the way it captures its subject's extrasensory watchfulness... It's uncanny. If I heard its subject softly breathing, I would hardly be surprised."
Link to Post:
http://www.canadianart.ca/online/reviews/2012/05/31/edouard-vuillard-a-painter-and-his-muses-jewish-museum/
David Balzer reviews the exhibition Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 at the Jewish Museum, New York, on view through September 23, 2012.
Balzer writes that in the exhibition "one sees not only a fabulously talented painter at work, but also rich context, and multiple stories being told. One of these stories is of the prestigious Jewish patronage cycle in late-19th-century France... Another story is, both specifically and allegorically, of a painter's intimate relationship with his patrons... Yet another narrative is of an artist''s odd psychosexual attachments to three women, including his mother, who became muses always slightly beyond his reach. And were all of these stories unknown to viewers, there would still be the high literariness of the paintings themselves: scenarios examining the nature of time and memory, and the consciousness' reflection in the built and natural environments, with resounding echoes of writers of the era such as Marcel Proust (an acquaintance of Vuillard's), Henry James and Virginia Woolf."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2012/05/31/chantale-joffe/
Phoebe Hoban reviews an exhibition of paintings by Chantal Joffe at Cheim & Read, New York, on view through June 22, 2012.
Hoban writes: "The in-your-face impact of [Joffe's] paintings comes as much from scale as technique. These are big blowups of women, exaggerated and poster-like. There is no visible brushwork or impasto - instead there are obvious drips. It is in these drips, casual yet deliberate, random but not really, that Joffe's latent expressionism lurks. Oddly, one of Joffe's strengths is her sense of purposeful restraint. She is to painting what Raymond Carver is to short stories: an expert minimalist. While employing more detail in her approach to portraiture than Alex Katz, whose legacy she also clearly inherits, she refrains from full-blown realism, implying rather than mirroring reality."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/52262/lucian-freuds-wrong-turn/
Thomas Micchelli reviews the exhibition Lucian Freud: Drawings at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on view through June 9, 2012.
Micchelli writes: "Freud, who prided himself on his draftsmanship, stopped drawing [in 1958], and didn't pick it up again until years later... The earlier works are not attempts 'at a record,' as the artist described his later painting, but layered images of sculptural form, calligraphic line and riffing imagination..." Micchelli continues noting that in Freud's drawings "most of the work retains an openness to the unknown - the quality most lacking in Freud’s unvarying technique and theatrically staged compositions."
Link to Post:
http://artrated.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/searching-within-review-of-alice-neel-late-portraits-still-lifes/
Lily Koto Olive reviews the exhibition Alice Neel: Late Portaits & Still Lifes at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, on view through June 23, 2012.
Olive writes that "the interior lives of [Neel's] subjects peer out at us from within their surfaces. Neel's uncanny ability to capture her subjects psychological states in the moments they sat in front of her reads intensely in person. The personalities reveal themselves through Neel's fluid handling of paint; stories unfolding, lives and past moments cascading into the present. I immediately wanted to know more about the lives of the people she was surrounded by."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/contemporary-realism/galvanized-truth-a-tribute-to-george-nick
Larry Groff posts an extensive tribute to painter George Nick to accompany the exhibition Galvanized Truth: A Tribute to George Nick, featuring 37 of Nick's colleagues and students, Curated by Kim Alemian, on view at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts through September 9, 2012.
Groff's post includes quotes from Nick's teaching as well as the catalogue essay Judging by Appearances by painter Christopher Chippendale which begins: "George Nick once said that he began studying painting because he was interested in the world and painting seemed like a good way to learn about it. Conceived as such, painting was an investigative tool that, when turned outward to the world, could yield truths and meaning and an understanding of why things are the way they are. Later, as a teacher, Nick would present his students a way of thinking about painting that, while practical and concrete, was geared toward the sort of enquiry he had envisaged when he himself started painting. Based in the fluid world of perception, this way of thinking had at its core the conviction that the aesthetic and the ethical are not so far apart in painting, that knowledge comes from a search for what is right and what is truthful."
Link to Post:
http://artobserved.com/2012/05/new-york-alice-neel-late-portraits-still-lifes-at-david-zwirner-through-june-23-2012/
A. Bregman blogs about the exhibition Alice Neel: Late Portraits & Still Lifes at David Zwirner, New York, on view through June 23, 2012.
Bregman writes that Neel's "depictions are at once traditionally representational and non-traditionally provocative, with the images of her neighbors, friends, family, and other New Yorkers portrayed in a way that questions the confines of socioeconomics and heteronormativity. By depicting her own unconventional life, the portraits of her friends and family took on a greater societal significance that continues to resonate on view today."
