Friday, May 19, 2017

At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edgar Degas
Visit to a Museum
ca. 1879-90
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Visual art offers many different kinds of interest.  Any attempt to argue that one kind is superior to all the rest regularly ends up as not much more than apology for one's own narrowmindedness.  But what is possible, I think, and maybe necessary to criticism, is to identify a kind of interest that certain works of art have which marks them off from the forms of image-making all around them.  (It is not the only kind of interest that even these works of art have to offer.  It is just the kind that is peculiar to them.)  Certain works of art, I should say, show us what it is to "represent" at a particular historical moment  they show us the powers and limits of a practice of knowledge. That is hard to do.  It involves the artist in feeling for structures and assumptions and patterns of syntax that are usually (mercifully) deeply hidden, implicit, and embedded in our very use of signs; it is a matter of coming to understand, or at least to articulate, what our ways of world-making most obviously (but also most unrecognizably) amount to.  I think that such work is done with real effectiveness  and maybe can only be done  at the level of form.  It is the form of our statements, and the structure of our visualizations, that truly are our ways of world-making  at any rate the ways that hold us deepest in thrall.  That means there is a necessary (though of course not sufficient) relation between the intensity and complexity of a work of art's formal ordering and its success in pursuing the questions: What is it we do, now, when we try to make an equivalent of the world?  And what does the form that such equivalence now takes tell us about the constraints and possibilities built into our dealings with Nature and one another?"

 T.J. Clark, from Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999)

Edgar Degas
Dancer with arms crossed
ca. 1872
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Lorenzo Lotto
Madonna and Child
with St Jerome and St Nicholas of Tolentino

1523-24
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Dirck van Baburen
The Procuress
1622
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of poet Luis de Góngora y Argote
1622
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Diego Velázquez
Don Baltasar Carlos with Court Dwarf
1632
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singer Sargent
Villa di Marlia, Lucca
1910
watercolor
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singer Sargent
Villa di Marlia, Lucca - Fountain
1910
watercolor
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Édouard Manet
Street Singer
ca. 1862
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singer Sargent
Portrait of Charles Stewart, Sixth Marquess of Londonderry
carrying the Great Sword of State at the Coronation

1904
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Claude Monet
Road at La Cavée, Pourville
1882
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Claude Monet
Poppy field in hollow near Giverny
1885
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singleton Copley
Boy with Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham)
1765
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Mary Ann Wilson
Young woman wearing a turban
ca. 1800-1825
watercolor
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston