Via the Pace Gallery Blog.
Tag Archives: Chuck Close
Fodder from the Reader
Taking another day for the old novel, which is still going full steam, I’m happy to say. However I did get a chance to do a little web browsing, and voila! interesting things abound:
- Hyperallergic has a lovely post contrasting museum art versus street art in terms of how we experience it, with bonus points for working in Proust.
- Innovative trend: artistic funeral urns?
- The Dull New Global Novel from the NYT Review of Books. The title says it all.
- Abstract Expression had a mother? Apparently those macho men have some secrets…
- Jerry Saltz’s webpage
- Jhumpa Lahiri and Chuck Close make President Obama’s advisory committee via Culture Monster
- The Royal Shakespeare Company is doing a residency at the Armory this June, maybe even one-upping my beloved Shakespeare in the Park
Unrelated thought: ‘Write what you know’ is rubbish advice. The whole point is to imagine and create, not replicate in dronish detail. If we did that, there would be no magical creatures, no fantasy, and no sci-fi. Not to mention relatively few happy endings, if only because it’s hard to know where things end in life. You can’t wrap up a person’s life after the good parts like a story.
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Portraiture: the ignored step-sister of Contemporary Art
The Old Masters all did portraits in oils as their bread and butter, but that isn’t the case with the big names in art today. Damien Hirst is immersed in formaldehyde, and the majority of great talents are swirling in the shapes of abstraction. Who is painting portraits today? By portrait, I mean the old-fashioned, limited definition that focuses on a human subject and depicts their likeness in oils on a canvas with a degree of verisimilitude.
The real question is, does anyone do that anymore? The photograph is many way has taken over the simpler aspect of portraiture, that is, to record a person’s appearance. I was struck by the amount of portraits in the Met’s exhibition Art and Love in the Renaissance Italy, and by how few I had seen by contemporary artists. That’s not to say portraiture is a dead art, but it is hardly a genre that gets a large amount of attention.
There are a few artists of note, however:
Closest to Tradition
Elizabeth Peyton does small, intimate portraits of friends and cultural icons much as the Old Masters would have, that is, with an eye to documenting what the person looks like. She focuses on portraiture, a rarity these days. A successful and well known artist, she is the only one whose oeuvre consists mainly of portraits.
Figurative Painters of Erotic Tendencies
John Currin is well-known for his figurative paintings, albeit of a more erotic nature. Yet he documents people less and less as stylization’s based on cartoons and old masters like Lucas Cranach, and more like individuals. For example, see this portriat of Rachel Feinstein, his wife.
Like a photograph, but not
Chuck Close made his reputation on photorealism and figurative painting. While it’s true the style below in this self-portrait is not one Rembrandt would have used, it doesn’t comprimise the viewer’s impression of what he looks like. His very large productions that recreate the pixellated effect of prints and photographs while focusing on a realistic face.
A dying style?
Obviously this is not an exhaustive survey of contemporary art. Please tell me if I’m missing something big.