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February 23, 2007
Notes to self
“As a matter of fact, he almost never takes the liberty of being himself unless someone builds up his confidence and leaves him alone in an empty room,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a 1957 essay, “The Venetian Pariah.” For Sartre, Tintoretto is an avatar of existential anguish, who was both behind his time—as the last native-born master on a scene ruled by a cosmopolitan élite—and ahead of it, as the ideal artist for a rising bourgeoisie that was too intimidated by the pomp of the ducal republic to recognize itself in his demotic trashings of aristocratic decorum. Intellectuals of the era, while in awe of Tintoretto’s gifts, scolded him for being too fast, careless, and insolent; when Vasari credited him with “the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced,” it wasn’t meant as unalloyed praise. (Vasari also called him the medium’s “worst madcap.”) --- PETER SCHJELDAHL in the New Yorker
Go see the Tintoretto exhibition at the Prado and the Portraiture in the age of Picasso at the Thyssen. Go, go, go to Madrid.
*****
Go visit Venice despite your long standing prejudice against a city that can only stink with that much canals. The biennale starts in June.
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Graffiti on a wall, an ejaculation, spatters of bird droppings and chewing gum flattened on the pavement, inarticulate curses - "every body has prombles woste then mine" reads one hopeless message they found scrawled on the street and incorporated in a picture. Gilbert & George's London is more than a backdrop. It teems with life and dirt, shock, surprise, boredom and beauty. Their retrospective is as relentless, cumulative and varied as anyone could ask for. You exit winded - you've seen too much. Like the city itself, the show is uneven and sprawling, and goes from dark to garish, sexy to monstrous. Their best and worst are here - and which is which, one keeps on asking, and what do we mean by best and worst? Good filthy or bad filthy, raving mad or just raving? Are they brave or are they bores? They provoke ambivalence. The contrariness and contradictions are essential to their art, and to our responses to it. --- Adrian Searle on The Guardian
Go visit the Gilbert & George exhibition at Tate Modern. It ends in May! Go, go, go to London.
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"Hay is a tiny market town in the Brecon Beacons National Park, It has 1500 people and 41 bookshops."
Go to Hay-on-Wye! Someday.
Posted by claudia