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Heinrich Schwemminger (Vienna 1803 - Vienna 1884). Recto: Siegfried (from the Nibelungenlied), Verso: Two Bearded Men (Huntsmen Looking On) Recto and verso: graphite on cream wove paper. 105 x 118 mm, 4 1/8 x 4 11/16 in. |
| New in The Berkshire Review for the Arts: The Basics of Connoisseurship, a series, begins, with Bad Art vs. "Bad Art." |
| Reviews |
| Drawn to Drama: Italian Works on Paper at the Clark Art Institute and from the Robert Loper Collection |
| Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum |
| The Manton Collection at the Clark Art Institute |
| Outsider Art: a Pair of Objets Trouvés: I and II |
| Romantic Drawings from Vienna: Heinrich Schwemminger and Ferdinand Schubert |
| Basic Reading |
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| The best of the arts in the Berkshires, New England, and New York: see our schedules and previews of Berkshire arts. |
"In the 45 years that I've been writing criticism there has been a tragic depreciation in the traditional skills of painting and drawing, the nuts and bolts of the profession. In part it has been caused by the assumption that it's photography and its cognate media - film and TV - that tell the most truth about the visual.
It's not true. The camera, if it's lucky, may tell a different truth to drawing - but not a truer one. Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object. A good drawing says: "not so fast, buster". We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game. This was not a problem when the Academy was founded, because in 1769 such media were embryonic or non-existent. A quarter of a millennium later, things are different. But drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies - the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about - is apparently immortal."
Robert Hughes, A Bastion against Cultural Obscenity, speech at Burlington House, June 2, 2004 (link to full text)
| Also of interest | ||
| Michael Miller Photography |