Word: painterly
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...Tenor José Carreras, Baritone Ingvar Wixell, orchestra and chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Colin Davis conductor, Philips; 2 LPs). This interpretation of Tosca is nothing if not eccentric. Davis' reading of the florid score is rich and clear but systematically undramatic. As the idealistic painter Cavaradossi, Carreras gives a properly ardent performance, but it seems lost on this particular Tosca. The elegant Caballé can no more be made into the hot-blooded actress than the eyes of Cavaradossi's Mary Magdalen can be changed from blue to black...
...outs are Matisse's last resolution of two visions of nature that were woven into his birthright as a painter: the European heritage of symbols. One was the artificial paradise garden, whose chief example (for Matisse) was the Alhambra in Granada-nature tamed, formalized and patterned to the highest degree of artifice and comfort. A work like the Large Decoration with Masks, 1953, with its repeated gridwork of leaves and cloves, alludes directly to Arabic tilework. But the other prototype was the vision of the natural paradise, exemplified since the 18th century by Tahiti. Matisse had gone to Tahiti...
...that Matisse was obsessed with dialogue between nature and culture is, perhaps, to say no more than that he was a painter. But the intensity of that conversation between perceived and stylized form in the cut-outs renders them heroic. They are the climax of the symbolist tradition in France, and may be the greatest works of visual art in that tradition...
...stabbed Maitland? Apparently someone who knew him, because there was no sign of forced entry. To know Maitland was to loathe him; he was a foul-mouthed brawler, a womanizer, a raging egomaniac. But he was also a genius of the first order, the finest painter of female nudes since Matisse and Bonnard. In recent years his paintings have sold for up to $100,000, and presumably prices will rise after his death. Who covets the paintings, or the money...
...world-a guileful art dealer, a slithery lawyer, a glittering female collector of celebrities, a vacant former model who is Maitland's widow, and so on. All of these art lovers are very covetous indeed. The most appealing, though not necessarily the most villainous, is a brilliantly facile painter named Jake Dukker, who has profitably latched on to every new art fad in the past 20 years. Says someone of Dukker: "If the Hudson River School ever comes back into style, Jake will be sitting out there on the Palisades, painting the river and trees and clouds and Indians...