Word: temperament
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...Poles, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa is far more than an object of Roman Catholic reverence. It is a source of historical continuity, a cause and remembrance of national liberation from foreign enemies, and a fount of miracles. The 4-ft. by 2½-ft. gilt-and-tempera dark-hued portrait of the Virgin Mary and Christ child is laden with gems and silver. By legend, the painting is attributed to St. Luke the Evangelist, and was executed on a table top from the house of Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Nazareth. It origins are unknown, but it may date...
...take long to realize that the name "garden" is hopelessly inappropriate. Unless it refers to a terrarium somebody forgot about for three years so that everything inside it has rotted, providing mulch for all the worst fungus and scumcrawlers in God's imagination. Everything is painted in aggressive tempera paints, greens and reds as flat as a Boston accent, and a horrible school-bus-yellow. I don't have to tell you what school-bus-yellow means in this town. I am beginning to get nervous. The American flag is hung up backwards, at least from where I'm sitting...
Close up, you can see the pencil lines on all the posters, drawn to make sure the tempera slogans come out nice and straight. 18 by 15 inch slices of white cardboard, they hang square-cornered around the room, like paintings for sale in the lobby of a tacky movie theater. All red, white, blue, and black, all a little scary. The B-1: A Necessary Vitamin to Ward Off the Red Disease. Win One for the Gipper: Reagan 1980. Help Put the Laffer Curve to Work for Reagan. Big Government is the Enemy Within. Table SALT. And stretched across...
...Metropolitan Museum is bound to be successful. That, in the Met's eyes, means so jammed with people that the art will be virtually invisible. At 59, Wyeth is the most popular, perhaps the only popular "serious" artist in America. For the past 20 years his elaborately finished tempera paintings of the landscapes and neighbors around his winter farm in Pennsylvania and his summer house in Maine have become indistinguishable, for an enormous public, from a dream of vanished moral rectitude. Every split clapboard reveals the American grain; each shot deer and plucked blueberry suggests the frontier. The faces...
Embalmed with Paint. The detailed, stroked, sandpapered, flecked surface of Wyeth's tempera painting - "weaving" is his own word for it -conveys an obsessive sense of scrutiny. "I really like tempera because it has a cocoon-like feeling of dry lostness-almost a lonely feeling. There's something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive or hornet's nest." Paint embalms the objects on Wyeth's cold-comfort farms; it stresses their distance from one another and from the eye. Combined with his fondness for large legible shapes and photographic cropping...