painting | ZETEO

Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles - Number 11, 1952 (National Gallery of Australia)

Valéry, Landscapes, the Whole Human

May 22, 2019 by William Eaton

Re-translation and notes regarding a chapter from Paul Valéry’s Degas Danse Dessin. Thus: reflections on landscape painting and many other things, including the idea that « L’homme complet se meurt. » The whole human being is dying. With images from Aelbert Cuyp, Claude le Lorrain, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Jenny Holzer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Bradford, Judith Bernstein, the Cranachs, and William Eaton (the re-translator).

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, featured, France, Impressionism, landscape, literature, Marcel Duchamp, painting

MORANDI, RELATIONSHIPS, FASCISM, STILL LIFE

November 23, 2015 by William Eaton

Living with the objects, they became his family, his neighbors, his friends. — Janet Abramowicz, former assistant to Morandi You don’t have to paint a figure to express human feelings. — Robert Motherwell [1] (1) For what, in the past year, have been revealed to be psychological reasons, I have long been drawn to the still lifes of the twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, one of the great still-life painters, etchers, and watercolorists. There is a dominant interpretation […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: families, fascism, Italy, Morandi, painting, relationships, Still Life

Morandi, Bonnard, and Silences Within

June 25, 2015 by William Eaton

By William Eaton Maintenant, Ethel l’a compris . . . Now Ethel understood: it was the emotion of her great-uncle that was making her shiver. That such a tall and strong man was immobilized; it was because there was a secret in this house, a marvelous, dangerous, fragile secret; the least movement and everything will come to a halt. — J.M.G. Le Clézio, Ritournelle de la faim (my translation) 1 The twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi is best […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: art, Bonnard, family, incest, male gaze, Morandi, painting

Renoir, Love

May 22, 2015 by William Eaton

{click for Renoir, Love: Pdf} Harvard’s Fogg Museum does not think of itself as “portrait gallery”—it includes more than “just” portraits. Nonetheless, I am prepared to make the following, likely unprovable, assertion: The percentage of wonderful portraits to total number of artworks on display is greater at the Fogg than at any other museum in the world. Among my favorites is Renoir’s Victor Chocquet, shown at right. Renoir’s reputation as an Impressionist painter is rather in decline. His bathers, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Eakins, Harvard University, Impressionism, love, male gaze, painting, Renoir