From the outset, Morisot’s work was distinctive. Her female subjects had “a profound psychological presence”, reflecting her own experience of womanhood. But she was also expressing life’s impermanence. “Her work’s lack of finish conveys, like no other Impressionist, a sense of evanescence. We do not live long”. More images are here.
Prescience is a word often associated with Bayrle. In his first job in textiles, he realized that large images could be created using mass repetition of a small image. His “superform” style resulted and it resonates strongly in our digital age. “I believe in total individualism, even in the largest mass. I think that’s the richness of art, to define this singularity in the mass.”
Klingemann uses artificial intelligence to generate art. As he describes it the process sounds more human that one might expect. What he aims to produce: “visual pleasure”. The source of his art: “the model and the software.” His role: “the curator of the machine”. How he describes his digital portraits: “vague memories of paintings that never existed.”
Avery, it seems, was nearly great. His talent lay as a colourist and seeing Matisse’s work led him to the idea of a painting as a field of colour, one without depth. Then he met Rothko who both promoted Avery’s career and was inspired by his subtle and distinctive use of colour. Avery’s work, said Rothko, was “the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.”
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is not to everyone’s taste. These artists wanted to overturn Victorian England’s stodgy art with an aesthetic that emphasized colour and idealized the past. They, and their swooning damsels, now look anachronistic but they were a small step toward modernism. And they have, as one critic observes, “an armour-plated niche in the English imagination”.
Online aesthetics are driven by algorithms that “optimize” our experience. Is this a good thing? “What we crave most in art, what we reward more than anything else, is surprise. Computation is not good at this. [It produces] an increasingly perfect average. The visceral reaction is to rebel against these simulations of progress and perfection.”
Who’d have thought hiking was so complicated? The 18th century Romantics liked to depict trekkers experiencing the grandeur of Nature. Modern art wants to do more. Rothko and others were ambitious not to show the hiker but to elicit the hiker’s feelings in the viewer. “Should art be about showing a person as he experiences a feeling or … actually creating that feeling?”
Da Vinci has been so famous for so long that we tend to see a “deified” version of the person. Martin Kemp, perhaps the most acclaimed da Vinci expert, has written a book that tries to determine where the truth lies. Da Vinci, he says, was “the ultimate outsider … a rather modern, scientific man who looks a lot like us … a scientist doing art [rather than] an artist distracted by science.”
A seemingly important show that, with the summer lull, has received few reviews! Iron was first smelted in Africa 2500 years and the aesthetics of iron objects have always been prized. Many objects were created to be both useful and beautiful. In an abbreviated review Holland Cotter calls this “the most beautiful sculpture show in recent memory. “ Images are here and a video here.
It says a lot for Mary Pratt’s art that, as a female painter living on Canada’s geographic periphery, she achieved national prominence. Pratt painted domesticity – “gutted fish, jars of jelly, unmade beds”, elevating these familiar objects by showing “the drama of light. How it falls, how it alters the ordinary objects it adorns … no ordinary object is without a sublime aspect.”
Cartier-Bresson is synonymous with the term ‘the decisive moment’. That is often taken to mean a split-second action shot – like his famous image of a man jumping a puddle. But, as a New York show highlights, this view is too narrow. Cartier-Bresson’s aim was bigger; to capture the ephemeral event that revealed a bigger truth, to “”trap” life – to preserve life in the act of living.”
Why does stained glass rate so low in art’s pecking order? Not only does it have ancient roots but it was an important part of the work of Mondrian, de Kooning and Matisse. Clark, a leading exponent, believes that stained glass, coupled with architecture, can uplift the urban environment, an art of the whole space. “Once you’ve tasted it, you really want another lick at that lolly.”
Monir has lived a life between extremes. She fitted into the art community in both New York and Tehran. Her artworks were destroyed in Iran after the 1979 Revolution but now a Tehran museum is dedicated to her. And her work spans both the Islamic geometric aesthetic and western abstraction. Notes the writer “it’s not clear that she particularly needed Western abstraction”.
A survey of fashion photography exposes some deep fault lines – notably, is fashion photography art? One reviewer makes the case strongly, even while admitting it is the “bastard stepchild of the fine art world”. This writer is unsatisfied. Of course it is art, but “of a distinctly minor sort. As art, fashion photography is thinner than a supermodel. Call it anorexia aesthetica.”