Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/albrecht-durer-master-drawings-watercolors-and-prints-from-the-albertina-at-the-national-gallery-of-art-washington-d-c/
Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through June 9, 2013.
Naves writes that "the curatorial point is obvious: Dürer was a phenomenon. Is a phenomenon, if the response of the crowds attending the show is any indication. Huddling around the works, viewers can’t look closely enough at the images—because of their small size, sure, but mostly because of Dürer’s huge talent. Ensconced, as it is, in the East Wing, the section of the museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the exhibition may (as a friend suggested) prompt doubts about the progress of art: Sixteenth-century Northern Europeans had the meticulous intensity of Dürer; we have to settle for the decorative flourishes of Ellsworth Kelly, the subject of a concurrent exhibition at The National Gallery. An apples and oranges comparison, perhaps, and any museum-goer seeking proof of art’s forward march will inevitably be frustrated. But if Dürer the man is history, then Dürer the artist is forever our contemporary, a figure whose virtuosity—at once both clinical and deeply intimate—withstands anything so mundane as time passing."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/69690/durer-in-dc-some-observations-on-the-great-observer/
Thomas Micchelli reviews the exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through June 9, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "Dürer’s boldness with his materials is evidenced in what is probably the most emblematic image to come from the Great Observer, namely 'The Great Piece of Turf' (1503)... The work is minimal in its color choices — tonal gradations of raw umber and mint green, with dabs of aquamarine and amber — and if you continue to look closely at it, raising your eyes inch by inch up through the weeds, it can seem like a dull profusion of busy green verticals. Take one step back, however, and the whole thing pulls together, not unlike a Jackson Pollock or a Joan Mitchell, with the blank backdrop suggesting a field of hazy, ambient light while simultaneously behaving as an undisguised paper support. The great piece of turf looks virtually collaged to that support, its dry densities of paint creating a hyper-real alternative reality to the paper’s all-too-real, blank tactility."
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://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://www.artnews.com/2013/01/23/veronese-at-ringling-museum/
Ann Landi reviews the exhibition Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice at the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida, on view through April 14, 2013.
Landi writes that the "number of Veronese’s drawings and paintings in American collections... allowed [curator Virginia Brilliant] and her chief collaborator, Frederick Ilchman... to assemble a show that tells 'the whole story of how these masterpieces went from the artist’s very first doodles, his first ideas for a composition, and how he worked those up into very highly finished drawings' and from there to paintings." Landi also notes that "Henry James called Veronese the 'happiest painter' of the Renaissance, one who enjoyed a reputation for vivid color and the creation of a festive mood even when his subject wasn’t a celebration."
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."
Link to Post:
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/the-road-to-van-eyck
Julie Beckers reviews the exhibition The Road to Van Eyck at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, on view through February 10, 2013.
Beckers writes: "The showstopper however has to be The Annunciation (c1430-35), once perhaps the left wing of a triptych. It is here Van Eyck is at his best. The detail on the cloak of Gabriel, who, with a soft smile, conveys the glorious message to the Virgin, at which he points with a delicately lifted finger, displays the quality of the painter’s abilities. The wings of the angel remind us of Fra Angelico’s work at San Marco in Florence and a more complex theological scheme enfolds in the Romanesque architecture which alludes to the era of the Old Testament; the glass windows which depict God flanked by Moses, scenes of the Old Testament which can be made out between the Signs of the Zodiac on the tiled floors, the three glass windows which refer to the Trinity and the lilies to the virginal purity of the Madonna."
