The holiday crush of visitors at the Met Museum was daunting, so we took refuge in the antiquities. What kept catching our eye was bodies–the timeless and fascinating seduction of the human form, ubiquitiously present in the expression of art from the very beginning. Thank you Bryce Aragon for your companionionship on this Met meander. […]
Weighing in on Beauty, part 2
A few more insights on beauty… To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. Santayana When I think of Art, I think of Beauty. Beauty is the mystery of Life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness […]
Getting Hammered
But for once I wasn’t thinking in words; I was hammered by the image. I couldn’t explain what the picture expressed, what I intuited from it. But that it spoke, I had no doubt. Patricia Hampl, from Blue Arabesque Patricia Hampl’s book delves into her life changing experience of encountering a painting by Matisse at […]
Bilbao-ing Boston
The new ICA is the lastest museum version of the hit tune, “if you build it, they will come.” Bostonians have been waiting to fall in love with something architecturally new and exciting, (a population still recovering from earlier adventures in architecture that failed, like City Hall) so the ICA is awash with visitors. This […]
Weighing in on Beauty
The whole idea of beauty was not embarrassing to me, as it was for a lot of people. Its one of the things that was encouraging about Rothko, that he didn’t seem to be embarrassed about it, either. Brice Marden The best book on the subject of beauty is still Uncontrollable Beauty, edited by Bill […]
Pondering Marden’s Nebraska
Marden cuts the cord that still bound an artist like Jasper Johns to the literary underpinnings of nineteenth-century symbolism, without simultaneously destroying art’s ability to evoke natural forms. He jettisons story, myth, and illusion, and with them representation, composition, and spatial depth. What we are left with is paint, canvas, scale, shape, and brush stroke—but […]
The Pursuit of Subtlety
Tyler Green writes: As I walked through the Corcoran’s new permanent collection installation, I bumped into an old friend. Up on the second floor I found Anne Truitt, twice. One was magnificent: 1962’s Insurrection, a vertical plank, painted red on one vertical half and pink on the other. Like all the best Truitts its beauty […]
The Current Slow Muse Credo
What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that […]