Even when his style is at its most self-effacing, smoothly drawing us into the moment, we remain, inevitably, outside.
Natasha Seaman
Natasha Seaman is a professor of art history at Rhode Island College with a specialty in 17th-century Dutch painting.
Posted inArt
The Problematic Allure of Titian’s Poesie Paintings
Titian’s paintings are masterpieces, with all the complications of the term.
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A Silver Exhibition’s Classist Undertones
Despite the artistry on display in this Gorham Silver exhibition, I found it difficult to suppress a kernel of class hatred in looking at it.
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An Artist’s Commentary on the Damages of Men
The most shocking thing about Sarah McCoubrey’s paintings is their startling and deeply unfashionable, unapologetic beauty.
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Botticelli Through a Graphic Novelist’s Eye
For Botticelli: Heroines + Heroes, the painter, cartoonist, and graphic novelist Karl Stevens was called in to provide interpretive drawings of the Renaissance master’s paintings.
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Yugoslavia’s Complicated Modernism
The 20th-century architecture of Yugoslavia was the result of a concerted national effort to modernize and unify.
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Looking for Leonardo in Verrocchio’s Studio
Leonardo’s hand is fleshed out in this exhibition, but so is that of Lorenzo di Credi, Jacopo del Sellaio, and other workshop assistants to whom no name can be attached.
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Searching for Redemption in Post-WWII German Art
While Inventur proposes that we seek to understand and empathize with these artists, their biographies constantly nag at the moral centers of the brain.
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The High Life of Vermeer and his Contemporaries
Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting reinserts Vermeer into the tradition in which he worked, both demystifying his paintings and lending force to his particular take on the genre.
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Diversity and Fraternity in 19th-Century French Prints
The Société des Aquafortistes encouraged not only the printmaking arts, but also a sense of camaraderie among its artists.
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The Heavy Metal Symbolism of the Salon Rose+Croix
A show of Symbolist paintings at the Guggenheim makes it clear that 19th-century France had an infinitely more interesting fin-de-siècle flip-out than we did in the 20th.
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A World Unto Himself: The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers
Even in Segers’ early work, there is a sense of perversity, not with the Modernist goal to épater la bourgeoisie, but in a kind of damn-it-all, Mr. Toad behind-the-wheel sort of way, boop-booping and careering down the road for the sheer pleasure of it.
