Word: painterly
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THERE WAS a New York painter named Ad Reinhardt who, before his death, had advanced his art to such a point that he was painting canvases that were--well, frankly, they were entirely black. They looked as if Reinhardt had given them a couple of swipes with a paint roller and called it a day. Some critics maintained that the discerning eye could pick out subtle variations from painting to painting--in the play of tone underneath the black, or in the direction of Reinhardt's brushstrokes--but the fact remained that to the masses, aside from...
...brush strokes have an extraordinary intensity-not so much delicacy as martial precision: one imagines the brush slashing down and up like a sword as it described the pair of sharply angular branches that project to the left of the tree. And so it probably did; for the painter, Kaihō Yūshō (1533-1615) was the son of a warrior family, raised in a Zen monastery and reputedly a great swordsman. There could have been very little difference between the reflexes that drove the blade and those that aimed the brush...
Whether you thought of the picture as cold or warm, the plum blossom throbbed with the youthful emotions of the painter. Probably Keiko had painted it just...
What became the Revolution's house style, neoclassicism, had been steadily developing since the reign of Louis XV. The grand exhortations to "order and severity" produced by the Revolution's painter laureate, Jacques-Louis David-The Oath of the Horatii, Socrates Drinking the Hemlock-were about as hierarchical and elitist as art can be. They were about heroes, not average men; and the world of stoic virtue and exemplary action that unfolds in them is far removed from the reality of the Revolution. The fate of David's portrait of Lavoisier and His Wife was instructive...
...resurrected" in the late 19th century, he has been to many people the epitome of 15th century thought: the great artificer of volume and silvery space, the very essence of the relationship between mathematics and nature in which the quattrocento's self-image was rooted. No Renaissance painter has spoken more eloquently to the 20th century than Piero, with his vision of a sublimely abstract order dwelling in a thicket of concrete and manifest forms-figures, architecture, drapery; and because there were so few known paintings by him (apart from the great fresco cycle in Arezzo), the night...