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Page 6 Art World March, 1986- Page 6 BOUCHER (continued from Page 1) Immaculate Conception. The mother of God had remained virgin, intact, mother through the tip of her finger, so to speak. As sex has yet to become a matter of study, everybody agreed to the dogma with marvelment: the God in which they believed was as able as Jupiter to do the trick. The Holy Virgin came of good stock. Her marriage of convenience to Joseph was everything except a misalliance and the cowshed episode could have happened to anyone. Owning to this, and to the concern for decorum, the Church inspired an imagery where the Madonna appeared as a Lady wrapped in gold and brocades; an inhuman fortress for which it was sufficient to know how to paint hands and the sublime face. Time and the devil aiding, artists longed for more to paint. So, they sat the Holy Child on his mother's lap. This pretext allowed the top of Mary's dress to be undone just enough to reveal a breast. Their daring enterprise started and stopped here. To go further would be too risky. Mythology led artists out of the blind alley. Diana, Juno, and Venus, became the avatars of the Virgin who, because of this, was able to show a lot more. The fall to earth proved permanent when goddesses gave way to a bevy of shepherdesses, maids and other mischievous darlings. Francois Boucher enters the picture here. Excepting the rural compositions in which he applies his energy to coloring trees and spoiling the portraits of cows, he devotes himself to the bedroom-landscape. The Madonna is, there, ill-treated with a heathen's fury. Buttocked, chubby, and flushed, she spreads herself into the velvet or on a narrow meadow where she loses her self-control. She beckons us to restock the planet with countless baby jesus'. The air is filled with disgusting [[image: THE TIMES THE WORLD THE ART; pictures of 4 different news papers; Subscription Form Name ______________________ Address ___________________ City, State, Zip __________ 1 year $20.00 2 years $40.00 Foreign $30.00 Check Enclosed Mail to: ART/WORLD 1295 Madison Avenue New York, N.Y. 10128]] little obese peeping-toms. Muzzles, candles, seashells, vegetables create a rather tacky counter-point for the lingering amateur. The sky is empty and God is dead before he has even been incriminated. All this will go along until the worn out paintings of the XIX century and the birth of the snapshot. Then, Modern Art, overwhelmed by anguish will undertake to destroy the image and will erase the traces of sacrilege through abstraction. All we have left are pictures in leisure magazines where multinational creatures, stripped bare, absurdly complicate the possibility of the human body. Their intense gaze, however, does not look at the viewer; it still sees the ruffled wings of the archangel coming for the Annunciation.... One day, the neurotic ape will climb back up the tree to paint miniatures and forget the whole saga. (Translated by Alicia Windle) FISCHL (Continued from Page 1) 75th, through May 11.) And what a wretched, damned world it is! All chronic nagging sexuality and grimly missed opportunities for satisfaction! For centuries, pimpled youths with their untempered bodies, their gawkiness, their furtive eyes and lives, their susceptibility to violence and insurrection, their willingness to conform and revolt, their nuisance value have been the subject of adult (and tribal) humour, ribbing, acceptance, manipulation and celebration. From the "peevish" boys of Shakespeare to the Hell-bound students of Joyce, in Oedipus himself this phase (in which Mr.Fischl is immersed) has been observed. But the emphasis has been on "phase" and rites of passage evolved to steer youth through it. But there are no coming of age parties, no College fazzings, no rituals or traditions to guide Mr. Fischl's boys. His hero kneels under "The Sheer Weight of History" (a female nude) and sucks his thumb. Frustration and thwarted eroticism is the fact of his life; the nature of his world. Toys, gadgets, houses, families, vacations- nothing can satisfy. Only the ever-playing TVset offers the dream of seduction, gives hypnotic almost-comfort. But there is alas no answer to the world's great question. How to conjugate? Fischl's youth's, isolate within families, locked in self, secret in a world of secrets, are like spies or other closet cases; terrified and longing to be known. But they know, and we are shown, that they are ugly; only their mothers could love them. And she will not. That is tabu. Which is perhaps the point of "Christian Retreat". A joyless world! One hero! like Portnoy with the family dinner, masturbates into the wading pool and even that act is denied virtue by the title "Sleepwalker". The titles are full of world-play, innuendo e.g. "Saviour Mother, Save Yor Love (r)". Is Cummings back in vogue? Or is Mr. Fischl an original? "Birthday Boy" peers surreptitiously at his place of birth. What your local newsagent is now forbidden to display publicly is hanging at the Whitney, naked and novelistically ashamed. The effect is of illustration. The viewer looks to the text for illumination. The pictures are incomplete, as unsatisfying as their hero's world. Mr. Fischl is attempting James Dean, Elvis rock, and the nihilism of Prince's videotapes, but he offers nothing of their vitality or action. The glamour of their rebellious stance is replaced by passivity. The appeal of their dress and props is displaced by slipshod instant-photo painting and an emphasis on "All in the Family" squalor. No one is going to linger over these pictures for the taste of texture and fold, the osmosis of sensuality or excitement. They are impoverishing. Mr. Fischl knows this. He is a sophisticated painter and a cynical packager. That is probably the real meaning of the critic Kuspit's claim that this art is "American-style". How artfully it dares comparison by dropping a memento of Manet, a hint of Hopper, a bit of Beckmann: I'm selling you Art. Ever been sold? The Whitney has. MORGAN (Continued from Page 8) about as they draw forms and organize pictorial ideas. There are actually four basic elements in the drawing process: the human figure, form in space, line and tone, and composition. Each of these four elements can be further broken down into additional components. The figurative element includes anatomy, proportion, movement, character, emotional expression, and interaction with other figures. The element of form in space involves organic and inorganic shapes in relation to environmental energies. Drawing techniques involve use of line in the definition of form, weight, and movement, and also the use of tonality in the definition of time, mood, form, illumination and darkness, and the inner glow of figures. And, finally, composition involves the use of all the previous elements in the arrangement of a unified expression. All in all, the total drawing may express a theme of events, or even further, a philosophical or spiritual revelation of the artist and his or her world. So you can see from the foregoing that the potential power to communicate within a drawing is very great, even though the drawing itself may have been done with the most strict economy of means. The Portrait Study of a Boy Wearing a Cap, #10, by Francesco Salviati (reproduced on the catalog cover), is the most immediately engaging drawing in the collection. Done in red chalk, the boy looks over his right shoulder with a charmingly gentle gaze. From behind his head, radiating lines suggest the direction of his gaze and strenghten the movement of the head. The figure glows with an inner light that accentuates the shyly affectionate quality of the boy's glance. A sheet of Veronese drawings, #16, contains studies for a Rape of Ganymede and a Last Supper. The small Last Supper sketch is a delight of compositional structuring done very quickly. The three small Ganymede drawings, on the other hand, which were done in brown ink and pen and wash, show a beautiful flow of the torso's anatomical forms that [[Bottom News Panel: Brooklyn- "From Courbet to Cezanne: A New 19th Century/-Preview of the Musee d'Orsay, Paris," more than 130 works: painting, sculpture, architectural drawings, drawings, photographs, decorative arts, and early films, will show at the Brooklyn Museum - March 14 to May 5. New York- Frederieke Taylor has been named the new Executive Director of the MacDowell Colony, this country's oldest and one of the most prestigious artist retreats. New York- March 15 to April 15 a retrospective of Mihail Chemiakin's work will be on view at the Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts Gallery, 138 Greene Street. Covering the period from 1964 through 1886, the exhibition will give viewers the chance to see the massive breadth and depth of this Soviet Exile's work.]] are done with a sparseness of line and tone. My own favorite figure composition in the collection is Group of Apostles, #20, by Federico Zuccaro. This is a real gem of a drawing done in pen and wash in brown ink over black chalk and heightened with white. There are three draped figures that are finely delineated. The wash renders the tonal planes of light with superb subtlety that gives a gentle illumination to the whole composition. The figures have a solidity, lightness and animation that is both anatomically correct and expressive in movement. The figure on the left has a forearm, wrist and hand done with a draftmanship that is just simply staggering in its skill. And last, a small Study of a Head, #32, by Pietro da Cortona, done in black chalk, is a beguiling combination of un utter simplicity of means and a maximum of expressive understanding. The drawing of this young girl comes to life because the artist leads our vision around and over the head through the ingenious use of tonality, accented lines, and contrast. The head of this young girl glows with a delicate light that seems to come from the energy within her and from the atmosphere around her. INDIAN (Continued from Page 8) where it was first seen, and it will travel to Seattle in May. It is yet another of the ongoing contributions of the Festival of India to this country, and thanks to the sponsorship it has from the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture, there are some remarkable objects here from Indian museums. The Kushans were invaders who came into north central and north western India from central Asia in the first century AD. Their benevolent rule lasted for two centuries, and because the empire included the paths of trade routes that stretched from Rome and the Mediterranean to China, there was a rich religious and cultural mix within India at that time. The great Kushan rulers were intellectuals themselves, and encouraged the development of the arts. Kushan sculpture is notable as being the first art style in which the image of Buddha is fully depicted. The influence that it had on the art of later periods in India and throughout other parts of Asia was profound. It is among the objects we see now on view at the Asia Society that we find the roots of much later Buddhist art. Another remarkable feature of the Kushan style is that it is divided into two distinct schools which existed simultaneously. One is a purely Indian expression which evolved in the north central region around the town of Mathura, and the other, a style known as Gandhara, borrowed certain of its elements from Greco-Roman traditions as well other Asian sources, and developed at the eastern side of the empire in what today is Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Mathura images are almost all made of the warm, soft, rose colored "sikri" sandstone of the region. This beautiful material lends itself well to the naturalistic and sensuous qualities of the style. Standing and seated representations of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas and attendants are shown as idealized forms in frontal poses where the body is lightly clad so that its features are completely revealed. Other figures are in the form of elegantly conceived water and tree spirits and different nature dieties. Their presence adds a lyrical element to the Mathura expression and they further emphasize the sense of life and grace that pervades the Buddha images. Visitors will be particularly drawn to the great fat figure of Kubera, the God of Wealth, a renowned masterpiece from the National Museum in New Delhi. This section of the show clearly forecasts the coming of the Gupta style in India, an expression that received its exhibition at the Society in 1978. By contrast, Gandhara works are usually made of gray schist, a relatively hard and dense stone which lends itself to fine detailed carving. The style is therefore more complex and greater attention is given to drapery folds, hair styles, and the depiction of specific pieces of jewelry and ornament. Impressive, almost life sized figures of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (particularly one with its gilding still intact) dominate this part of the exhibition. There are also a series of intricately carved stone reliefs showing scenes from the life of Buddha. A fine group of lovely stucco heads display a sensuous naturalism not found in the stone figures. Throughout all of the Gandhara works there run currents of other artistic expressions. Particularly strong are references to Hellenistic and Roman sculpture. Other examples are purely eastern in style, and draw their inspiration from trade route connections to central Asia. Rare bronzes and ivories and a group of gold coins give added variety to the exhibition and present the styles in different materials. It should be noted that the New York show has been carefully edited because of certain loan restrictions, and the smaller size of the Society galleries. Although the connoisseur might miss a few things, particularly those from the British Museum, and one superb stucco head from the Victoria and Albert, the sense of the exhibition is well maintained and, as always, beautifully set forth. Salut! CLASSIFIEDS FRAMING FOR THE ARTIST Wholesale manufacturer will Mat & Frame your work at below wholesale with overstocked & discontinued moldings. Phone 9-5 (718) 857-9105 ART/WORLD Published by Arts Review Inc. 1295 Madison Avenue, N.Y. (212) 427-2897 Editor & Publisher BRUCE DUFF HOOTON Editor THEODORA W. HOOTON Exhibitions Editor LYNN SEENEY Editor-at-Large GENE THORNTON International Editor LUISA E. FLYNN Washington & Business Editor NICHOLAS L. LUDINGTON Senior Editor BARNABY CONRAD,III ORMONDE DE KY GORDON R. FAIRBURN DON GRAY NATHAN C. HALE HART HOOTON RICHARD F. HUNNEWELL RAY MATHEW BARNABY RUHE JUDD TULLY Contributing Editor HOPE D. BROCK BARBARA GLABERSON MINNIE C. 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