The New Yorker, 2008-01-28

Adam Gopnik: organized hypocrisy (in France)

"Lifting the Veil" / Calvin Tomkins

• 'I've always liked to impose meaning on paintings that can't quite bear them.'
• Courbet.. liked to impose jarring contrasts between smoothly painted figures and crusty landscapes.
• 'Van Gogh had absolute pitch in color.. He could work in a key of green and find the full spectrum in that color... In Vermeer, you feel light coming out of the dark parts... The angels of painting - Titian, and the Venetians, and especially Velazquez - always painted with a wonderful combination of opacity and transparency. I'm lucky if I can get some transparency in my paintings, but if I try to get too much of that it becomes sentimental - I really mean effeminate.'
• 'So much art now doesn't want to look like art, but painting can't help it.'
  

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