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Joan Mitchell from 1977 at Christie’s

Tue, 8 May 2012 23:11:55 -0400

It was curious to see this Joan Mitchell at auction in NY while in Philadelphia this Scott (at right) was soon after offered at auction.
Very much too similar about the two works, even given Scott’s informal visit there to Mitchell’s Vertheuil home at the time of his work, than could be thought a tribute.
Seeing both in their respective auction previews, it was not simply size that made the Mitchell the grander of the two. I recalled seeing her work at Cheim & Read when I was first totally convinced of her power.

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RED: rothko at christies

Mon, 7 May 2012 08:23:41 -0400

a most beautiful painting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/arts/design/rothko-painting-sells-for-record-nearly-87-million-at-christies.html

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the illusion of symmetry

Wed, 2 May 2012 15:40:11 -0400

is it a fiction, symmetry?
is there really an absolute sameness in either direction at any point in any three-dimensioned object?
is it possible to recognize actual symmetry anywhere, or is it a comfortable intellectual conceit , a notion we’d like to believe because it helps our being comfortable in an imagined notion of simplification and order?
is there a kind of beauty in that conceit, even as we know it is only an imagination and clearly distinct from the physical.
and what kind of beauty can it be? how do you understand rather than order what you perceive in baseless intellectual conceit; or the obverse, to be comfortable rather than understand?

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last words of francis bacon, last interview, April 1992

Tue, 1 May 2012 15:24:19 -0400

Francis Bacon, in an interview, April, 1992. He died April 28.
“The important thing for a painter is to paint and nothing else.”

what you’re looking at is this quotation on the canvas-backed folding chair in my studio.
Music by Adam Berenson.
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The context of Lucian Freud

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 09:05:04 -0400

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979911-2,00.html
A quote from “The Fat Lady Sings” by Robert Hughes: “Can one imagine a painter like Freud emerging in America today? It's hard to, maybe impossible. He affronts too many orthodoxies, starting with the central one: the belief that realism -- the painting of things from direct observation, warts and all -- is dead or, at best, irrelevant. You may quote the human figure from mass-media sources, by means of photography, silk-screen and so forth. Or stylize the guts out of it, so that it approaches abstraction. Or else run "expressionist" variants on it, which have nothing to say about any struggle with the real and resistant motif, since no such struggle is encouraged.
American official taste -- late-modernist taste -- shows no real or sustained interest in artists who are prepared to make a life's work out of the challenge of imbuing real figures and objects with strong plastic meaning in deep space. There are a few exemptions, such as Philip Pearlstein, but that is all, unless you want to count Andrew Wyeth's Helgas, those goose-pimply feminine-hygiene ads that are to painting more or less what The Bridges of Madison County is to the novel. It seems that with the single exception of Thomas Eakins, who died more than 75 years ago, this culture has never produced a great painter of the naked body. It's pinups or diagrams, and not much in between.” “The Fat Lady Sings” Robert Hughes

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979911,00.html#ixzz1T1nkXBOp

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