Francisco Goya, “Fight with Cudgels,” (1820-23)
Tag Archives: painting
American Light
I wanted to note the passing of John Wilmerding (1938-2024), for many years the Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University. He died on June 6 of this year at the age of 86.
I didn’t really know Wilmerding at all–never met him, never really took a class with him. He was the guest lecturer for the week-long section on American art in my college-level art history class, Art 100, “An Introduction to the History of Art”–the closest to physical contact I ever got. But more than anyone, I owe Wilmerding credit for my decades’- long love affair with American art, and in particular, American landscape and maritime painting of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Continue reading
Democratic Vistas
It’s customary to celebrate Independence Day in the United States by recalling the glories of the American Revolution, and hauling out the idols of our “civic religion” for worship–primarily the Declaration of Independence treated as Scripture, and tales of the Revolutionary War treated as hagiography. I don’t find the American Revolution a particularly glorious event, and find most celebratory discussions of our “civic religion” tiresome. So this Independence Day, I’d like to change the subject. There are other things about America worth celebrating and discussing: not its politics or military valor, but its art. It’s always been a question whether American art has ever managed to declare independence from its European forbears, and always been a fear that it hasn’t. Those questions generally go unasked on Independence Day, but maybe they shouldn’t. Continue reading
To Calvary and Back
I found myself thinking the other day of Peter Breughel the Younger’s 1564 painting, “The Procession to Calvary.” I used to teach it when I taught aesthetics in college. As is probably obvious, it’s a depiction of Christ’s being taken to be crucified. It reminds me of so many things happening now, and vice versa.
Originals, Fakes, and Copies: Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism About Painting
I’m re-reading Ayn Rand’s Romantic Manifesto for an upcoming seminar on the topic, so my mind is on art and aesthetics. In that spirit, Robert Campbell, Stephen Boydstun, and I just revived a four-year-old conversation on Rand’s aesthetics, and I’ve been going back and forth with Anoop Verma on Facebook on the supposed aesthetic superiority of original paintings to their “exact” copies. For whatever it’s worth, I thought I’d reproduce some of that discussion here, in case it was of general interest.
As it happens, I read Verma’s posts on Facebook and responded to them without reading the fuller versions posted on his blog. After I read the fuller blog version, it occurred to me that the response I’d given Verma was very similar to the account of Nelson Goodman’s that Verma himself had quoted in the original post. Great minds thinking alike? Or fools of a feather flocking together? You decide. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 