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Naturally Among the Greats
Post #1487 • January 3, 2012, 6:29 PM • 3 Comments
Anthony Caro:
Helen Frankenthaler who died over Christmas was the first of the generation of colour-field painters who took up the baton of New York abstraction from the Abstract Expressionists. Staining onto raw unprimed canvas her paintings had a grandeur of ambition achieved by a seemingly direct contact between eye and hand. She used to say "it's all in the wrist" but this was informed by supreme confidence and faultless taste.
Sebastian Smee gets it straight from Sir Anthony.
2.
January 3, 2012, 7:45 PM
I certainly hope so. I only know for sure that he's the art critic of record at the Boston Globe.
3.
January 4, 2012, 6:30 PM
This warm-hearted and generous comment from Caro is appreciated after all the "bilge," as Darby put it. The photo in Smee's piece is cool too. Her work never especially clicked for me, but I just figured it was me. My wife loved her work and felt a connection through Bennington.
1.
Walter Darby Bannard
January 3, 2012, 7:24 PM
Contrast that encomium from Caro, a great artist talking about another great artist, to the bilge emanating from those nowhere blog floggers you quoted earlier.
Sebastian Smee? Is that a pseudonym designed for a sharp critic, patterned on the saint full of arrows and Captain Hook's right-hand man (so to speak), whom Barrie called "a man who stabbed without offence"?