ARTISTIC PRECEDENCE IN "OLD MASTER" PAINTINGS

I often go to see great “masters” for reasons that are not about beauty, innovation, transcendence, etc. but rather to find their “mistakes”, slip-ups, sloppiness, laziness, and pure incompetency that reinforce my idea - especially in regard to representational painting - that NO ONE is a “perfect painter”, even if all the art history books say so, and declare that those old guys and gals achieved excellence. Ingres is a great example - beautiful drapery with noodle fingers delicately placed on sumptuously painted fabrics.

Too many years of teaching and developing my eye cannot be shut off when I “eye” major exhibitions - So here goes with the terrific - yes still terrific - Manet/Degas pairing show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There are many images here and some paintings are wonderful just as they are, and I include them. Manet knocked out Degas in the 3rd round but Degas still got in some punches not that there was a competition though the Met might have handled it that way - making them competitors thematically. Manet has a luminosity and serpentine hand that can dance and punch its way around a canvas. Degas is softer - these oil paintings show why he loved pastels so much - they began crisp and became fuzzier around the edges as he developed - blending into the background. They both employ narrative and in my opinion, could have been edited….but alas I was not around almost two centuries ago.

With these photos (which include wall labels and details) I apologize for being too lazy to edit or remove the glare to peak culmination, I show some of the painting gaffes that distracted me. Manet loved to smush out a toe and fingers here and there; Degas would allow a pant leg to be as flat as an ironing board; canvases were literally torn /sliced away from the original works and I believe Manet just got too bored to finish up the less finer point of a piece. Also interestingly Manet was not afraid of using dark tones in even the whitest of draperies, but rarely would he model a person's particularly a woman’s face with darker tones. so some of his greatest depictions of women are very pale and delicate. The exception is a great Berthe Morisot portrait.

I loved seeing the show - don’t get me wrong - but I also love to search for the eccentricity and the humanity in the work.

THE BURIAL 10/23/23

 I recommend THE BURIAL which I viewed on Amazon Prime with Jamie Foxx as Willie E. Gary and Tommy Lee Jones as Jeremiah O'Keefe. This is a David vs Goliath law case litigated in a small Mississippi courtroom; a true story made into a film based on a 1999 New Yorker article by Jonathan Harr about the Loewen-O'Keefe trial exposing the exploitation of poor and black people by a billionaire Corporation. 

This is a powerful film as evidenced in one scene of a group of people viewing a vast, flat expanse of green with no headstones - a  burial ground of slaves. This plot of land references the historical roots of racism and how time piles up one injustice over another so that the original  'sins" are buried so deep they are forgotten. 

 The two lead actors are both passionate fighters for what they believe in. Watching Jamie Foxx with incredible charisma as a small-time, hotshot personal injury lawyer stepping out of his comfort zone to defend a funeral home director who decides to sue a company that is attempting to decimate his family's legacy made me forget the world falling apart around us. 

Tommy Lee Jones also gives a terrific performance, using his body to express the feeling of defeat, shoulders slumped with a gait that is no longer straight but unsteady. THE BURIAL is filled with sentimentality which felt appropriate in the beauty of the relationship between Jones and Foxx - opposites but both respecting each other's values. 

I particularly want to mention a young actor, Mamoudou Athie, a quiet and commanding presence as Hal Dockins who O'Keefe hires just out of law school and is a catalyst for much of the film's legal maneuvering.