blue (19)
Tang Chang Calligraphic Blue
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Something about the blue in the Mary Cassatt I was looking at yesterday and the calligraphy in the Persian miniature I looked at before that made me think of an extraordinary calligraphic blue that I witnessed in a show at the Smart Museum of Art a couple of years ago. for Issa Lampe [...] more
Cassatt The Child's Bath
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Today, I am thinking about loving a child, and worrying about them. [...] more
Cleveland Hike Cézanne
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
This morning we walked with the children in a preserve south of Cleveland. There were stone steps that allowed you to climb up and down along the river which fell over slate ledges in striated curves. [...] more
Weekend Glimpse: Cézanne Bouquet for Mother's Day
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Here is a Cézanne, The Vase of Tulips , from about 1890. It is at the Art Institute of Chicago. I took the photos. Happy Mother's Day [...] more
Faith Ringgold Story Quilts
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
“On the Beach at St. Tropez” was the first Faith Ringgold story quilt I’d seen, and I was completely unprepared for the encounter. I was floored. And know what that expression means as I find it is the right one: it means my soul rushed down to the floor so that I could look up and take the measure of this. I had already read the wall text, so I [...] more
Three Pissarros Over Time
Monday, May 4, 2020
A Pissarro landscape has a special quality. As in a Monet, the vegetation has a lift, but this is even a bit more pronounced, so that there is a strong space around the leaves, which have a kind of brio. Detail from Camille Pissarro, A Cowherd at Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise, 1874. As in a Sisley, there are glints, and the overall effect is quite bright, but the strokes are not quite as thin as Sisley’s. [...] more
Weekend Countryside Pissarro
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Sunshine today put me in mind of three Pisssarros at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Camille Pissarro, A Cowherd at Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise, 1874. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photos Rachel Cohen. And, second: Camille Pissarro, Jallais Hill, 1867. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photos Rachel Cohen. [...] more
Morisot – A Daughter at the Window
Monday, April 20, 2020
A daughter at the window is poignant. She is here with you, in the interior, but she is thinking of what lies beyond. Berthe Morisot, Cottage Interior, 1886. Musée d'Ixelles. Photos Rachel Cohen. Berthe Morisot painted and drew her daughter Julie probably several hundred times. There are masterpieces of Julie as a baby with her wet nurse, as a toddler swinging her foot in a chair, as a little girl with her father in the garden. [...] more
Sargent Stone Water Stone Paper
Frederick Project: Materials
Thursday, April 9, 2020
In 2013, a show of John Singer Sargent watercolors. I saw it at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; it was co-organized with, and also shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. These two institutions have the two finest collections of Sargent watercolors. These first details are from I Gesuati , ca. 1909. [Works shown in this post belong to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; except for two, belonging to the Brooklyn Museum, noted below. ] It [...] more
Hiroshige's Views of Kyoto
Frederick Project: Reconstruction
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
In December of 2019, I went to New York for a few days and various reasons, and I went twice to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was covering their show Kyoto: Capital of Artistic Imagination , for which they had reinstalled their Japanese galleries with works from their permanent collection that partake in the long Kyoto tradition. Kyoto was for many centuries the capital of Japan – this capital was eventually shifted to Edo, which is now called Tokyo. The two cities were connected by a famously beautiful road, the Tokaido [...] more
Delaney Self-Portrait Sketches
Frederick Project: Hasty
Thursday, April 2, 2020
This morning I went for groceries, had a zoom faculty meeting, the man came to help cement the cracks in our back foundation through which the mice are coming; my husband did the kids’ school and meals, wiped down the groceries… It’s a sunny and beautiful day, New York is running out of ventilators, Chicago is on the edge of serious trouble, I am probably already too anxious to write clearly. For the last few weeks, I have had an hour or two, even three, to write, [...] more
A little more late Manet
Frederick Project: Fortitude
Monday, March 30, 2020
Yesterday, I began from Manet’s morning glories and nasturtiums to arrive at a letter he sent to Marthe Hoschedé, with a water color of a horse chestnut on it. Letter to Marthe Hoschedé, Decorated with a Chestnut , October 10, 1880, private collection. Detail photo Rachel Cohen. In the exhibition, at the museum, next to the letter with the horse chestnut, there hung a watercolor of plums. Today I’m going to begin there. [...] more
iris Kensmil and Remy Jungerman Further Looking
Frederick Project: Before and After
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Yesterday I turned up a subject – a pavilion at the Venice Biennale with works by iris Kensmil and Remy Jungerman, curated by Benno Tempel. I decided to follow it through in the order of my experience: seeing the pavilion in June of 2019, having the sense of interest quickened, documenting something of what I saw, being offered materials which I glanced at, but kept, and then, some nine months later, paying another kind of attention, internet attention, which let me put together other layers of meaning. The installation was set [...] more
Faith Ringgold at St. Tropez
Frederick Project: Colors and History
Friday, March 20, 2020
Thinking of intense experiences of color in the last few months. Immediately Faith Ringgold. Her painted canvas and quilt On the Beach at St. Tropez , from the series of twelve story-quilts The French Collection , which came as a revelation in the Smart Museum of Art’s show called Down Time: On the Art of Retreat this past fall. You walked into the gallery and were literally flooded with color. Ringgold paints on canvas [...] more
Cézanne Still and Blue
Frederick Project: To Resolve
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Today I’m going to work on how Cézanne’s blue resolves. One sense of resolve is to determine to go forward. Cézanne’s perennial project. Famous for destroying his canvases, for painting them out and scraping them off and beginning again, for going out on the road every day to set up his easel and work again at the view of the bay, the view of the mountain. Speaking to few, often frustrated, lonely. The resolve [...] more
Blue of Paul Cézanne
Frederick Project: To Resolve
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Yesterday, I wrote about Beauford Delaney’s blue, green, and yellow – the way the blue filters down through the trees; the radiant effect of combined green and yellow. Today, I want to pursue blue. I’ve taught Rebecca Solnit’s essay on blue from her Field Guide to Getting Lost , and I’ve taught Maggie Nelson on blue in her book Bluets. Blue runs through many fields of study – those two writers and many others have traced its threads in landscape, in vision, in philosophy, memory, sorrow, tranquility. Today [...] more
A Shawl for Morisot
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Last summer, the summer of 2018, I was immersed in the work of Berthe Morisot. I spent three days in Québec City, at the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec, at the revelatory Morisot retrospective, which I reviewed for Apollo Magazine. https://www. apollo-magazine. com/berthe-morisot-comes-into-her-own/ I was one of the critics who called for a reconstitution of our understanding of Impressionism with Morisot centrally placed. I said that scholarship and consideration should be given to Morisot in relation to Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Monet, on all [...] more
Close Observation
Monday, January 20, 2014
A woman, long blue shirt carefully tied over striped skirt, sits in a red chair. She leans a little to her right, our left, elbow on the arm of chair. Her hands are folded. Cézanne’s way of painting faces means that you can look at them or not. Everything has surfaces and depths. Much of the meaning of the figure is not in the face. The folded hands are important and beautiful. Between the forefingers and thumbs are a green that relates [...] more
The Large Bathers
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Since my father’s death I’ve been twice to look at the Cézanne Large Bathers that our museum has borrowed from the one in Philadelphia. I might have gone more often but with the baby there hasn’t been so much time. It’s a vast painting – eight feet high and nine long. The wall text says its vault of tree trunks makes a cathedral and this is right, not merely architecturally. These tree trunks, along with a general impression of blue, and the gathered naked bathers, are the things you’re aware of before you know [...] more