"Still Looking" [.]

[fiefoe]

'Walls That Talk Too Much'

• The democracy of the eye implies a democracy of law... To reproach the American Realists with optimism and euphemism is to denigrate the affirmative message that art brings us all.
• Indeed, much of Western painting can be seen as an expansion, since the holy scenes on altarpieces, of what was considered worthy of being painted.
• Impressionism appropriated photography's apparent randomness of inclusion.
• When Sargent attempts to be bucolic, the effect can be sickly; he was rarely at ease with the color green.
• Central Park (Maurice Prendergast): its faceless figures, friezelike arrangement, and stained-glass colors applied in fat lateral brushstrokes as discrete as flagstones
  

'Street Arab'
__ His case is very American in that we feel something - the haut-bourgeois art market he had to court, or a prematurely closed mind, or a too-keen enjoyment of a comfortable and honored life - prevented him from doing full justice to his talent.
__ The finer talent of John Singer Sargent took a similar neoclassic turn, as if seeking, in the hustling world of privatized gallery art merchandized to the well-to-do, the kind of communal accreditation and official patronage bestowed on artists in the Renaissance.

'A Lone Left Thing'
__ Zeppelins with their flaming anuses frequently passed over Berlin - "a fascinating thing which transports one somehow every time one sees any of them," Hartley wrote.
__ As much as in a Malliol or Lachaise statue of feminine grandeur, erotic focus deforms anatomy;
A Nice Time: one lime-green lower corner somehow chiming with two corners of pale salmon above. Hartley could be as impudent and lyrical a colorist as Matisse.
Christ Held by Half-Naked Men: In the skimpy annals of American religious art this is among the strangest but not the least moving instance: a chorus of love objects silently cherishing "a lone left thing".

'O Pioneer!'  (Arthur Dove) / 'Jackson Whole' / 'Logic is Beautiful' (Nadelman)

• that nodding clockwork survey, punctuated by smiles of recognition, warranted by the.. retrospectives of Edward Hopper
• Surely one of abstraction's necessary concerns, though one little discussed, is to keep things from looking like faces, which our eyes are prone to see everywhere. 
• Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars. The spark of life comes in individual vessels.
  
• Moreau's luminous nebulae; vatic
• The artist is the thing; the works are just the shadow he casts to signify that he is in the room... Is-ness is all.
  
• There is an American tendency to see art as a spiritual feat, a moment of amazing grace. Pollock's emblematic career tells us, with perverse reassurance, how brief and hazardous the visitations of grace can be.
  

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