Painting

When I’m first invited to a sojourn in Madrid to learn about the life and work of Francisco Goya and the conservation work of Factum Arte, I’m thrilled but also a little apprehensive. While art-themed travel is right up my street and I live a mere train trip from the Spanish capital, Goya’s work is known for being a little, well, dark – particularly during his later years. As a fan of the Botticellis of this world, spending a few days with the artist famous for his "black paintings" was not something I was sure I’d enjoy.  And yet, three days later, as I stand in front of Goya’s grave in La Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida, I find myself moved in a way I never could’ve anticipated.

Georgia O’Keeffe is beloved for her oil paintings on canvas showing flowers and animal skulls: the first all soft, sensual openings; the second, spiky points and hardness.  Her works on paper are less well known. Yet, as MoMA’s exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, argues, paper played a key role in her early experimentation and art. As she told Alfred Stieglitz, the influential art gallerist and photographer who became her husband, “Why — it’s just like scrap paper. I throw it in the scrap heap and go on to something else.”  Paper is the beating heart of this retrospective, which shows 120 of O’Keeffe’s works from fifty-eight separate lenders, and which range from charcoal sketches to candy-colored pastels, rich watercolors to grainy graphite.

In January of this year, I joined the yearly flight of "swallows" who descend on Cape Town. Thousands of pasty Europeans swap their own chilly hemisphere for a few weeks in technicolor paradise. A day in, I was sold. Mountains to climb, waves to surf, open-toe shoes, a completely unworn jacket. Everyone I met seemed to make this a yearly thing, and I could see why. I spent a few days gaping at the sublime natural beauty before something else caught my eye: the art scene. Cape Town is the epicenter for African arts. Boutique hotels and restaurants are beautifully appointed with painstakingly handmade creations everywhere you look. Museums and commercial galleries abound with exhibitions spanning the whimsical and politically charged.

It was the ultimate summit between the two kings of pop-art camp, and one of the weirdest celebrity encounters even by the standards of 1970s New York. Salvador Dalí might have been the century’s most notorious modernist, but by the spring of 1973, when he was turning sixty-nine, his reign as the high priest of surrealism had descended into self-parody. Paintings such as his 1931 “The Persistence of Memory,” with its array of limp watches set in a barren landscape, had once sharply polarized critical opinion. For years, people saw Dalí either as a beacon of intellectual and emotional freedom, or as a madman who was more interested in money than art.

New York’s Upper East Side — 1018 Madison Avenue, to be exact — currently hosts another world at the Gray Gallery. It’s a universe with a near-scientific attention to detail. Plant stems are bisected and, in turn, bisect paintings like winding snakes; petals and branches are painted in such microscopic detail that they appear like the surface of some far-flung planet; and canvases are awash with such bright, clean lines they seem almost like subway maps of a particularly topsy-turvy city. The works — pastels, oil on canvas, and oil on linen — are those of Evelyn Statsinger (1927 – 2016), the deeply underappreciated artist who lived in New York, Chicago, and Michigan.

ParisThe Louvre’s Leonardo da Vinci is the latest Renaissance master in a procession of epic anniversary retrospectives — after 2017’s hugely popular Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, before next year’s inevitably popular marking of the cinquecentenary of the death of Raphael at the National Gallery in London. This year, with Leonardo’s posterity passing the same necroversary, the Louvre is augmenting its five Leonardo oils –– more than any other museum, thanks to the light fingers of legendary art critic Napoleon Bonaparte –– with a further six loans.

Peter Schjeldahl’s essay 'Renoir’s Problem Nudes' in The New Yorker has already attracted some portion of the contempt and ridicule it deserves. Here is my modest contribution to that task. According to Schjeldahl, Renoir 'sparks a sense of crisis.' 'Who doesn’t have a problem with Pierre-Auguste Renoir?' he asks in his opening gambit. Can we have a show of hands on that? Pace Schjeldahl, Renoir is such an immensely popular because his painting is essentially celebratory; he looked upon the world with an oeil bienveillant, glorying in its sumptuousness. There is great intensity in some of Renoir’s portraits, but very little melancholy. The dominant mood is festive: a happy, sociable sensuousness.