MOTHERWELL, WITH CAVILS I’ve long been an admirer-with-reservations about the work of Robert Motherwell (1915-91), presently the subject of a small show at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. My admiration is based on his fairly early work–pieces such as “At Five In the Afternoon” from 1950,     or “Elegy to the Spanish Republic…

A train of thought:                  

A Favorite Bechtle Robert Bechtle’s work is very “realistic,” but his compositions can be so deftly out of left field that the effect verges on the abstract. As here, in “Potrero Table” (1994). All the shapes are deliciously realized–run your eye around the table and the chairs, the plates, the light window frame shape that…

Peanuts Gone Wrong I will not be going to see the new Peanuts movie, which, to judge from on-line stills like the one below, will be like bathing in some icky visual goo. Part of the genius of Peanuts inventor Charles Schulz was his economy of means. This the movie has abandoned, perhaps thinking to…

 Fashion Agony I realize that fashion in the presentation of fashion is an ever-changing thing, but it seemed to me in the old days that clothes were intended to engender happiness. Models smiled. No longer, it seems. The tack now seems to be drama: these aren’t women such as one encounters in life, but supercharged,…

An artist’s compositions tend to employ characteristic devices. For example, these two Bruegels use the foreground oblique (the triangular shape beginning at one corner), block it with a tree at the edge of the canvas, and then zigzag into the distance.                       Corot uses a…

I think of the ’50s and ’60s as a visually as well as socially discordant period—the Gray Flannel Suit on the one hand, and hippie tie-dye on the other. But some things made sense. Perhaps it was only that television was still in its comparative infancy, but the Kennedy-Nixon debates, for example, were presented as…

The other day I looked down at my coffee table, which is typically a jumble of odds and ends in the process of being read, and there was Swann’s Way sitting on the current issue of the New Yorker. Proust and Jeb Bush–the odd couple, surely.        

I’ve often wondered about Christ’s odd stomach in Ruben’s “The Tribute Money” at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Clearly it represents no anatomical feature. All I can think is that there must have been a foreground figure–some child or dwarf or crouching somebody–who turned out to be a distraction. Billowing out the cloak…

I admire the illustrations of Gerard DuBois: quick witted, inventive, lively but unmannered execution. If the blackboard piece is reminiscent of Rene Magritte, it’s in a friendly, in-joke sort of way. More at gdubois.com. [illustrations lifted from The New York Times]