I do wonder about seeing a whole bunch of work all together with some painters - like seeing lots of drafts towards something. I felt this about Giacometti - you could see he was working something out over a long period - obsessively fine tuning something with subtle variation. Other painters/artists have a wildly varying range - Picssso obviously but also someone like Richter or Tillmans which probably suits them more to a retrospective. I saw a recent Constable show at the RA and was blown away with the range and subtlety of his work - a case where an exhibition was able to demonstrate range and variety and to confound easy preconceptionsthe last time i saw a few together in a gallery i was surprised by how cartoonish they looked. my guess is there's probably about 4 or 5 that work and a huge amount of chaff.
'Study of a Bull' and 'Study for Bullfight No. 1' are two favourites of mine. I love how wispy and barely there the former, the one you posted, is. I dunno how he was feeling at the time, but it's impossible not to see him in it, one foot out the door and disintegrating.Saw the Bacon at RA today. I’ve really tried to like his work but the best I could get today was that I understood it but I didn’t really like his view of the world/people. Despite all the curator’s claim of emotion, in the end I felt there was something cold and bleak in there - the one exception was the final painting which I did think was quite moving
It supposed to be his last painting - there’s the door he’s slowly seeping into - I like the way he takes Picasso on with the bull, wrests its symbolism away from PP and repurposes it for himself but for the rest I find most too flat - strangely austere. I’d have like more screaming Popes - those I do feel far more viscerally'Study of a Bull' and 'Study for Bullfight No. 1' are two favourites of mine. I love how wispy and barely there the former, the one you posted, is. I dunno how he was feeling at the time, but it's impossible not to see him in it, one foot out the door and disintegrating.
It does, it looks a bit like Gerald scarfedoes look quite funny and cartoonish though.
There's an interesting bit in the Beckett biography I half read about his relationship to Cezanne. Quotes Beckett writing about Cezanne, how C was the first landscape painter (in B's estimation) to have painted the landscape as it is, not as a romantic projection or reflection of the painter but as something entirely alien
i went becasue i assumed i enjoyed them. they make nice postcards. but when i got there and saw them in the flesh
i was repelled by them. everything about them disgusted me. the way they are painted. the crude, cartoonish quality of them.
they way they all have her in them. the vulgar literary freudianism. i came away thinking they are very bad and i really can't see
why i shouldn't be allowed to say so.