More Articles...
Print
Elizabeth Josephson
by Tomassio LonghiSideshow Gallery
The study of how an individual feature reflects a person’s soul, spirit, or personality is an old concern of artists. However, it is only at the end of the 19th Century and the turn of the 20th Century, with the advent of modern psychology, that artists became more cautious of physiognomic analysis. How can one forget Géricault’s powerful portrait of a kleptomaniac in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent or Van Gogh’s painting of an old French peasant, Patience Escalier, from a private collection last exhibited at the great "Van Gogh in Arles" exhibition at the Met in 1984? Let’s recall Gertrude Stein’s portrait in which many friends had complained to Picasso that it doesn’t at all look like her. Picasso’s famous remark was: "In the end she will manage to look just like it." And she did.
Perhaps, in the light of contemporary portrait painting, the issues of working from life should be readdressed, not because it is irrelevant or unfashionable to the current taste, especially when mechanical reproduction and the manual virtuosity have created the possibility hybrid quotations and all sorts of superficial readings of past art.
The works of Elizabeth Josephson, in spite of their obvious kinship with Oskar Kokoschka, Willem de Kooning or Alice Neel, seems to utterly stand alone on the other side of the track of this particular genre. While lacking the sureness of the painterly eloquence of the artists she admires, Josephson proposes a beautiful option— the resonance of her own vulnerability. In this case, it becomes her strength rather than her weakness. However slow in speed and deliberate in building the subtlety of tones or quickening of pace in becoming more spontaneous, one can find in two of her works, Janice and Ethan and Margerete, that Josephson’s handling of paint has a poetic infelicity yet it feels genuine and not overbearing with unedited form. The work in general invites a psychological response rather than a pictorial critique. I wonder, however, if the later would be an impediment to the artist’s growth?
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Artists for Artists, About some shared empathies
by Choghakate KazarianJUNE 2018 | Editor's Message
When artists speak of their peers, they reveal something about their own practices and aspirations: the longing for a kindred spirit or for what they are not and maybe wish to be.
PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince
by Maureen Catbagan and Amber Jamilla MusserOCT 2018 | ArtSeen
PÒTOPRENS is a feast for the eyes. Occupying three floors at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the show brings together twenty-five contemporary artists working in different mediums in order to showcase Haitian art, much of which has not previously been displayed in the United States. This breadth is a deliberate curatorial choice; it reflects the city’s geography and the resultant microcosms of artistic communities, and is a confirmation of the vigor and aesthetic prowess of Haiti’s artists.
Artists Extending Their Reach
by Mark RosenthalDEC 18-JAN 19 | Editor's Message
Proclaiming that artists are the central protagonists of the art world is self-evident: they make the objects and creative phenomena that are the core around which all else revolves. Beyond this fact, though, artists have extended their reach into the future by initiating artist-endowed foundations. In the last few decades, these entities have assumed a strikingly influential place alongside the other platforms of the art world.
Self-Taught Artists and Institutional Narratives: Can Museums Find a Balanced Response to an Exclusionary Past? Leslie Umberger Speaks with Kerry James Marshall.
JUL-AUG 2018 | Critics Page
2018 has seen untrained artists surge at major American museums, with the group exhibitions Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art and History Refused to Die at the Met, and the upcoming retrospective Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). Leslie Umberger, SAAM’s curator of Between Worlds spoke with artist Kerry James Marshall, who wrote the introduction for the accompanying monograph on Traylor.
RSS