"Still Looking"

[fiefoe]

'Epic Homer'

[Henry James:]
__ To think, to imagine, to select, to refine, to compose, to drop into any of the intellectual tricks with which other people sometimes try to eke out the dull pictorial vision - all this Mr. Homer trimphantly avoids.
__ He naturally sees everything at one with its envelope of light and air.

"Mending the nets": remote from the spiritual politics of America's wistful relation with its own landscape, they bring a neo-Grecian hauteur, a formidable coldness into Homer's work.
"Undertow": Have any painted figures ever been more thoroughly wet than these? a willed magnificence

__ the sunny uncrowdedness of Homer's oils
__ a boyish readiness in their talents, a quickness of assimilation, a creative eagerness which gives a morning sense of the world grasped afresh
__ There is in him a stunning, almost mad absence of two major presences in modern art: theory, and cities... Whistler, the expatriat who wasted much of his talent on theorizing and posturing, was the anti-type of his reclusive contemporary. With Homer, we feel no waste, just a succession of smaller or greater acts of possession.

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Eakins:  a man born out of his time, with all the gifts except a confident pre-modern humanism.

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'Whistler In the Dark'

• trying to catch up painting with the newly propagated photographic version of what we wee- the crowded, unselected details, the spontaneous overlappings and eclipses. What painting once delivered with a good conscience - a sense of arranged tableau, of theatrically presented drama - Whistler is unable to deliver.
• He needed, as painter, to stay out of the sun.
  
• By instinct and doctrine he declined to walk through the door to the future, which was color.
• Children and fog, empty sea and the dark, sitters with their faces averted - Whistler, though his image was cocky and brazen, as a painter was shy.

epicene, plein-air, friable

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