Giovanni Battista di Jacopo (1494 –1540— known as Rosso Fiorentino–the “red Florentine”) painted this Deposition in 1521, when he was twenty-seven. Goodness! We should all do so well. It’s engaging in several ways. The shapes are crisp and simple. The composition is a lively interplay of diagonals against the severely rectilinear cross and ladders, all…

You wouldn’t suppose that Matisse was thinking of Goya’s Proverbs when he painted The Dance, but maybe a connection only seems improbable because the pieces are so different in effect. Maybe he was thinking of it, doing a variation. (If any Matisse scholars want to weigh in, I’ll be happy to add their responses to…

There is so much stuff in the world that there’s no way to notice everything, but sometimes things just reach out and grab you.     For example, these two clocks by Adolph Loos (1870 – 1933) at the Neue Galerie in New York. Loos was an architect who also designed furniture and all sorts of objects.…

These two pieces by Sir Thomas Lawrence (left) and Thomas Gainsborough (right)  hang on opposite walls of the same room at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. This hanging seems appropriate, because while the subjects were both very fancy ladies, the intentions behind their portraits could hardly be more different.  …

We tend to get spoiled in art books and museums, which focus on an artist’s finest work. Clarifying to the eye, therefore, are shows such as “Matisse from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,” now at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The show isn’t trying to be comprehensive; it’s…

Picking up on my comment last week about Vuillard’s soupy tabletop: in that piece, soupy is a defect because it confuses that shape, and also because it’s inconsistent with the handling of the paint elsewhere, which is either pretty lean or pretty rich and lumpy. But there are ways and ways to handle surfaces. Here we look at…

The typical work of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) is characterized by intricacy of design and richness of color. This early piece (painted when he was about twenty-three) is more economical than most. The striking thing about it is the boldness and variety of its shapes. Look at them one by one: the dress on the wall (if that’s what…

    This is my snapshot of a gray Mark Rothko on a gray museum wall.* The photo doesn’t flatter it, though it’s a little hard to make out, even in the flesh. It’s pretty spare for a Rothko. The white margin looks like a frame, but isn’t; it’s just an uncharacteristically messy and unresolved edge…

Old-fashioned (call it “pre-war”) art was often inventive and visually complex. The Edward Hopper piece here is full of odd colors and shapes. Its rhymes and repetitions–the bread and butter of composition–are subtle. But it works, it holds together, and the only real diss that a committed modernist could lay on it is that it’s a…

Robert and Jane Meyerhoff must have been either very peppy connoisseurs, or very well advised, or both, judging from the show of their collection at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco ( until October 12).* The show includes all fourteen of Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross,” painted between 1958 and 1966. Now I have to admit that…