James Weeks (1922-1998) was a figure in the Bay Area Figurative movement in the ’50s and ’60s. His work tended to be strong in color but more reserved and pictorially conventional than that of his confreres.  This piece is a favorite. The figures and objects in it are descriptive but refined to simple shapes. These…

Even the esteemed pre-Impressionist painter, Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883), could do a dud from time to time. Every artist does, though it’s hard to imagine that the creator of “Le Dejeuner” (right) could have been guilty of something as inept as “Baudelaire’s  Mistress” (below). The clunky face, the huge hand, the far, far feet…

Effective expression requires clarity about what you are expressing. For example, this photo by the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. The interesting thing is how the apparent awkwardness of the shot, with one leg awkwardly cut, is key to its subject, which is a boy in the street, not just the boy. C-B was making…

Horses are a common subject in art, usually presented in graceful and noble poses like the Stubbs racehorse or Keisai warrior here.                     Then we have the piece below by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Hokusai has contorted his beast into an almost abstract shape, and incorporated it…

On Friday afternoons the sculpture majors at my art school would gather for the weekly critique. Sometimes it was very cozy; one of the graduate students would put up a piece that we all knew he’d been working on, and knew would be good. We’d spend ten or fifteen minutes smiling and nodding and agreeing…

Matisse again.  Part of his strength as an artist is that he doesn’t sweat the little glitches and infelicities that would drive someone less confident to go back and tweak this and that until the whole thing was reduced to bland decoration. For example, his portrait of Sarah Stein. The colors are dull. The blacks,…

  Before considering narrative style in the etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), it’s useful to establish a base of comparison. Here we’ll use a piece by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). The point is that Goltzius works out his forms in full, and is consistent throughout the piece: everything he shows, important or not, gets the…

  James Ensor (1860-1949) is best known for ebullient mindscapes such as “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889”, full of caricatures and wacky juxtapositions. But I do love his “Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise,” painted two years before (at the age of twenty-seven!). As narration, it’s pretty standard; you have your angel in the…

Speaking of Matisse, it’s worth noting that while he was nothing if not original, he didn’t disdain those old-time pictorial devices. In “Luxe, Calme, et Volupte” his composition is based on the foreground oblique (a diagonal receding into space), and effective use of haloing. Haloing involves pushing the contrast between an object (e.g., a figure)…

    One of the unexpected delights of the recent Matisse show at the Met was “Sculpture and Vase of Ivy.” I’d never seen it before. The surfaces and layers of paint are fascinating in the Matisse-y way, which is only partially evident in reproduction (hasten to the Tikanoja Museum in Vaasa, Finland to see…