The content in painting is always the painting, the question being not who but how. That’s why it’s possible for a painter to tip his hat to Max Beckmann with a bird painting even though Beckmann concentrated on the human, not the avian.
Max Beckmann, Double Portrait
1946
Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Image via)
Beckmann, Still Life With Fallen Candles, oil/canvas 1929 Detroit Institute of the Arts (Image via)
Brooklyn’s Andrew Keating picked up on Beckmann’s essential qualities and spun them into a feathered form whose fluid simplicity makes it contemporary. Keating’s bird is contemporary
with an early 20th-Century heart. Beckmann’s rough paint handling is
there, his coarse intensity and bursts of bright
tonalities.
Keating Lucy, oil/linen, 2009 9 x 12 inches
Beckmann wasn’t an abstract artist either. Seattle’s Robert
C. Jones takes a balcony lattice abstracted from Matisse and painted it as Beckmann might have, with black soiling his red silks.
Jones, Mexico Red, 2009 oil/canvas 20 x 16 inches
In painting, the new has roots in the old or it doesn’t matter.
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