Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2013/04/piero-della-francesca-severity-and.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about the exhibition Piero della Francesca in America at The Frick Collection, New York, on view through May 19, 2013.
Sultan writes: "When people speak of his work as being calm, I would say 'still.' Rather than calm I see an austere presence, a severity of form and mien, in the sense of 'a strict or stern bearing or manner' (Mirriam-Webster). Many years ago, when I first saw the great Piero fresco cycle at Arezzo, I was surprised at how passionate the paintings were; I'd been expecting something cool and intellectual from looking at reproductions. This passion is contained within tight bounds, lending the works a sense of the eternal, of life not easily spent, of looking beyond 'this mortal coil.' "
Link to Post:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/86b1e492-a107-11e2-990c-00144feabdc0.html
Rachel Spence reviews the exhibition Tiziano at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, on view through June 16, 2013.
Spence writes: "Whatever his subject, the Venetian master always dissolved intellect into imagination; conceptuality into organic compositions. No wonder he is the painter’s painter; the touchstone for Rubens, Velázquez and Delacroix. (The latter said that all great painters were Titian’s 'flesh and blood.') Yet the Scuderie exhibition complicates this narrative in intriguing ways. The clutch of familiar masterpieces – the Uffizi’s winsome 'Flora,' the Louvre’s enigmatic 'Man with a Glove' – are a thrill to behold. But it is thanks to a remarkable core of mid-to-late religious paintings that a different Titian emerges: darker, deeper, more explicitly spiritual; anticipating Caravaggio in his experiments with light and shade."
Link to Post:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112813/piero-della-francesca-frick-reviewed-jed-perl
Jed Perl questions the critical response to the exhibition Piero della Francesca in America at the Frick Collection, New York, on view through May 19, 2013.
"What troubles me isn’t that people are embracing Piero’s work," Perl writes, "I love much of it, too—it’s that they are reluctant to see that its power is inextricably bound with its limitations." Perl observes: "It is [the] skittishness about overt emotion, this desire to show what [art critic Adrian] Stokes called 'the separateness of ordered outer things,' that powers Piero’s art. Although we can probably never know what Piero’s contemporaries saw in his intricate compositions, what we see is not a perfect world but a problematical world, where form absorbs feeling, and the effort to create an ideal order is the only reasonable response to life’s everyday confusions."
Link to Post:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9ec62328-80c7-11e2-9fae-00144feabdc0.html
Robin Blake reviews the exhibition Barocci: Brilliance and Grace at the National Gallery, London, on view through May 14, 2013.
Blake visits the show seeking answers to the assertion, by the Director of London’s National Gallery, that "the now obscure Federico Barocci of Urbino, was a better painter than his contemporary El Greco."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/notable-painters/review-piero-della-francesca-at-the-frick
Xico Greenwald reviews the exhibition Piero della Francesca in America at The Frick Collection, New York on view through May 19, 2013.
Greenwald writes that Piero's Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels "is an often-overlooked work by Piero... Mary sits in the center of the painting, subtly larger than the four angels surrounding her, the scale-difference giving her quiet grandeur. Holding a flower in her right hand and with the baby Jesus on her left knee, Mary has a classical poise. Her garments fall naturalistically down over her form, like an ancient monument to Hera. And, as if to underline Piero della Francesca’s sense of order, her robe folds into a perfect circle at the base of the throne along the central vertical axis of the painting, giving the artwork a sense of supernatural symmetry and composure. Though crowded with figures, the space in this painting breathes easily and a pearlescent delicacy of color adds to the visual delight. The painting of St. Augustine, on loan from its home in Portugal, is also a marvel of virtuosity; the Bishop’s miter and mantel, covered in images of biblical scenes, is, on its own, almost as full of imagery as an altarpiece."
Link to Post:
http://www.pirihalasz.com/blog.htm?post=897987
Piri Halasz reviews Piero della Francesca in America at The Frick Collection, New York on view through May 19, 2013.
Halasz writes: "The paintings at the Frick are all oil and tempera on panel, and are accordingly well preserved and/or restored. Their combinations of composition and color afford bewitchingly beautiful images, even though there is relatively little variation in their subject matter. One is a small Crucifixion, and one is a relatively large Madonna and Child enthroned with four angels, but the remaining five are all single images of standing individual saints. Two are large, full-length figures, while three are smaller, three-quarter length ones. All seem to have been painted in the later stages of Piero’s career, after he’d returned to his hometown and was executing commissions for local churches (he died in San Sepulcro in 1492). What I love about all these figures is their statuesque simplicity, their dignity, their nobility and at the same time, their complete and moving innocence. These faces are too peaceful to convey signs of inner or outer stress. And their subtle, often paler colors likewise detach them from the everyday and situate them in another world."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2013/01/sacred-landscapes-australian-aboriginal.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about the sacred nature of Australian Aboriginal paintings on view in the exhibition Crossing Cultures: the Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art, on view through March 10, 2013.
Sultan writes: "The story of the beginnings of these paintings is very interesting: for thousands of years, Australian aboriginal painting was done on rocks, on sand, on bodies. It wasn't until 1971-2, when art teacher Geoffey Bardon encouraged the men at Papunya in central Australia to put their ephemeral sand paintings onto canvas, that a new world of painting began. At first the work was quite controversial; sacred designs meant to be solely for ritual and only seen by initiates were being shown. Soon the artists confined themselves to depicting symbols that were not secret and could be seen by the public, but they still used traditional dot patterning, and the paintings continued to be immersed in the sacred landscape."
Link to Post:
http://www.haberarts.com/2013/01/the-unmerry-prankster/
John Haber muses on the enduring "strangeness" of Rosso Fiorentino's Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist on view in the exhibition Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing at The Morgan Library, New York, through February 3, 2013.
Haber writes: "On loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Holy Family has not lost its strangeness. That may sound impossible after so many years. Now that anything goes, plenty of people have needed Robert Hughes to reawaken and then assuage 'the shock of the new' even for modern art, much less Renaissance Italy... Rosso starts with a tight-knit family right out of the High Renaissance, but after that, all bets are off. Only Jesus has anything to stand on, a green cushion way too plush for a manger, while John and Joseph without their lower bodies barely fit into the picture. An insensitive later owner—or a prankster like Rosso—might almost have cropped a much larger composition, but no, this is it. The background is dark, confused, and indefinite, and the foreground is insanely crowded. Jesus clings to Mary for comfort, while Joseph presses up against her in worship and fear. Revision of the past has slipped into subversion."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63065/the-rose-is-not-a-rose/
John Yau considers the work of painter Jay DeFeo. A retrospective of DeFeo's work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through February 3, 2012. The exhibition will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York from February 28 - June 2, 2013.
Yau writes: "DeFeo was a religious painter in secular clothing that wanted to integrate the sacred and the profane. Her works repeatedly suggest that one never quite escapes dirt and decay. At times, there is something grim and joyless running through her work, which is another reason why it strikes me as more medieval than anything we associate with the Renaissance. Paradoxically, in the drawings there is a lightness of touch that folds another level of feeling into them. DeFeo seems to have lived a messy life on a number of levels, often saving things most of us would throw away — the handle of a broken coffee cup, the discarded orthopedic cast worn by her dog wore when he had a broken leg, and the Christmas trees she kept while living on Fillmore. These things would become inspirations for various artworks. In them one senses DeFeo’s belief in talismans and occult power."
Link to Post:
http://www.haberarts.com/hubert.htm
John Haber muses on the Friedsam Annunciation in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Officially attributed to Petrus Christus, the painting has, in the past, been considered the work of the Hubert van Eyck, the mysterious brother of Jan van Eyck.
Haber writes that "among the twenty panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, Hubert usually gets credit for the ones with flatter figures and exaggerated perspective. Erwin Panofsky, a titan among art historians, attributed the Friedsam Annunciation to Hubert, and textbooks generally complied. Only one small problem: nothing can be assigned to him with certainty, not even a hand in the Ghent Altarpiece. Not a single other painting comes with his signature or clear documentary evidence in his favor, and consensus has slowly fallen away... I cannot say for sure who painted this, but its old-fashioned perspective captures precisely Mary's two-point choices, with the implication that she need not choose. So does the strange composition of walls within walls and gardens without gardens. Once one admits passage through one, anything can follow. Panofsky stresses the signs of 'unregenerate nature,' of 'the blind forces of growth and decay' from which the new order promises salvation. One should remember, though, whose advent in this tale has broken through the walls—or who in the cosmos might share the painting's strange point of view from above. Hubert himself might not have broken through to the Renaissance, but someone's gaze, at once a god's and a very human viewer's, is looking both ways at growth and decay."
