Word: temperament
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Murder & Belief. A slow, meticulous worker in the early Renaissance technique of egg tempera on gesso panels, Cadmus builds his pictures up with thousands of tiny brush strokes, finds time to complete only three or four a year. He had interspersed his Sins with cleverly composed little pictures of ballet dancers practicing and handsome boys having fun on beaches. There was also a photographically sharp scene of mob violence, Herrin Massacre, which described in bloody detail the murder of a gang of strikebreakers by coal miners at Herrin, Ill. in 1922. Like many of Cadmus' best works, Herrin...
...best in the show, a tempera House by the Seashore (see cut) by the University of Wisconsin's Ray Obermayr, owed an obvious debt to the two living U.S. masters: Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper. It struck a low blue note characteristic of the exhibition as a whole. Buffalo's Hubert Raczka had painted a lonely little figure through the bars of a fire escape, called it Insignificance. The Portland Museum School's Robert Galaher had wrapped his hulking Circus Worker in a sad, smokelike haze, and Milwaukee's John Pagac had contributed a fatly photographic...
...children and madmen. No matter how simple the material he borrowed, his perceptive, neurotic vision transformed it into something immeasurably sophisticated. He experimented endlessly with techniques, scratched designs on blackened glass, painted on burlap, mixed his media until it was impossible to describe a painting as oil, watercolor or tempera...
...pictures miss few of the hairs. Using the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting on wood panels, Hurd confines himself to precise portraits of people and places, dramatized by isolated figures, long shadows and cold, gleaming colors. The paintings that tell of the barren hills and washes, the deserts and clear bright light of New Mexico are as knowing and sincere as an honest man's praise of his own family...
...that effect, Bishop half-conceals her figures in shifting shadows and dim spangles of light. She highlights some shapes with dabs of tempera, underlines some with India ink scratches, blurs others out. As a result, her subjects seem to be glimpsed through the rich, hazy surfaces of her pictures. Their evanescent quality led one critic to remark that Bishop was battling an insidious foe, "none other than invisibility...