Monday, April 11, 2016

The old shirts ii









Kelly's art was the art of the flâneur,
but of the flâneur who was immersed in
his own empyrean imagination and dis-
tilled each fragment of the world into
an exquisitely enigmatic form ... The
suppressed, almost covert relationship
between the artwork and its quotidian
subject gives these images their quiet-
ly equivocal power. The experience of
nature is masked as it is given an ab-
stract force, so that these reliefs
turn out to be about something bravely,
thoroughly abstract as the idea of fil-
ling space without filling it.

Our masthead introduction did not say
it better than Jed Perl, above, or Gene
Swenson, discussing Lichtenstein: 

The picture is a stringent but amusing exposure of visual as well as social habits.



















Ellsworth Kelly
  Blue Diagonal
  Diagonal
New York
2009

Ellsworth Kelly in studio

Flâneur revised 
rmbl

Jed Perl
New Art City
  Welders and others
Knopf, 2005©
op. cit.

Jed Perl
editor
Art in America
  1945 - 1970
  Writings from the age ..
Gene R. Swenson
The New American Sign Painters
  Art News
  1962
Library of America, 2014©
op. cit.





2 comments:

  1. I can't find it now, but one of your posts mentioned Eugenio Montale's poetry, 1920-1954, which, Amazon willing (facilitating, rather), I promptly acquired, hardback and all, the FSG Galassi translation. I have to thank you for this and so I do.

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  2. Galassi's translations and his own work are an especially rich undercurrent here, and can be discovered by using the 2nd Search engine ("Search me/Query") in the sidebar, entering the name, galassi. You are recalling postings dated December 12, 2010 and April 12, 2012, probably. I thank you for returning me to them for consideration. Thank you also for your note; nothing could be more gratifying than to pass such things along, as one of these postings concludes by saying.

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