Some days I despair between the Cy Twomblys (Cy Twombly, 1928-2011, American)
The Shield of Achilles
usually hangs outside a room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art entirely dedicated to Cy Twombly
A room dedicated to Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days At Iliam, in 10 parts (including The Shield of Achilles), oil, oil crayon and graphite, 1978.
Whorls, scribbles, words written in a disorderly and childish fashion.
and the Howard Hodgkins (Howard Hodgkin, 1932-2017, British)
A Leap in the Dark, 1992, oil on wood.
Howard Hodgkin, 1932-2017, English. On loan to the Philadelphia Art Museum 2016
In Mirza’s Room, 1995-98, oil on wood
Howard Hodgkin, 1932-2017, British. Exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, NY in 2024
and other uninspiring work
Glen, 1985, synthetic polymer paint, oilstick and Xerox collage on canvas, and detail.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1960-1988, American. Private collection on loan to MOMA, NY in 2016
Achille (epoch), aquatint, 2015.
Julie Mehretu, American born Ethiopia 1970. MOMA, NY.
A whole new generation come to bother Achilles as if Cy Twombly was not enough.
Planet, 2014, mirrored tile, black soap, wax, shea butter, and vinyl.
Rashid Johnson, American born 1977. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
which have been filling up our museums for decades, accompanied by museum wall scripts which make you further despair for their obtuseness.
One day I came out of a lift in the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington DC and
there was this marvelousness, solitary on a wall with little natural light which focused your eyes on the light in the painting.
This painting is 44 years old.
Detail of Bather with Outstretched Arms, 1980-1981, liquitex on museum board.
Graham Nickson, British, 1946-2025. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
We have been, of course, on a well-documented adventure away from realism and representation. A little more than 100 years. It was initiated by Marcel Duchamp in 1917 when his fountain was rejected as an object of art.
Fountain; porcelain urinal, 1950 version of 1917 original, Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968, American born France. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Banned from the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, New York, for “obscenity, unoriginality and lack of seriousness.”
Adventures (in the US) have succeeded with Abstract Expressionists, Surrealists, Pop artists, Conceptualists, Minimalists, land artists and those for whom light, words, video, found objects, textile, paper, fiber, and wood; performance and the human body are primary tools of their artistic expression. And all their derivatives. All continuing at full tilt.
This work has, in part, been a reflection of evolving ideas of individual autonomy and identity. In part it is about the vast appetite of the art market for ‘new’ work and the sums of money which this can generate.
Some of this experimentation has been and is exhilarating. We would not be going without Jackson Pollock or Robert Rauschenberg or any number of non-representational artists.
Canyon, 1959, oil, pencil, paper, metal, photograph, fabric, wood, canvas, buttons, mirror, taxidermied eagle, cardboard, pillow, paint tube, and other materials. Robert Rauschenberg, , 1925-2008, American. MOMA, New York
The artist, who began making his Combines in 1954, combined found objects, painting and collage. The photograph in this, one of Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal early works – many layers, many referents – is of the artist’s son.
Much that passes for non-representational art is derivative, repetitive, and banal for the obvious reason that concepts are as difficult to evolve and express artistically as they are difficult to evolve in the discipline of philosophy.
Often we are not being told anything new. Or anything we know in a novel or expansive way. Or anything at all.
Blue corner piece, 1970, elastic corner. Fred Sandback, American, 1943-2003, collection of Virginia Dwan exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in 2016
And sometimes we are being told this nothing with uninteresting, shoddy and unimaginative execution which is accepted without comment because there are, especially when you have become famous, no clear standards of execution for work that is conceptual, minimal, non-representational.
In this context, the undercurrent of contempt for art which is figurative, representational, realist during the last 75 years is disheartening.
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Even cows have been corralled to lecture us to give up representational and figurative art because those traditions, supposedly, had, by the 1960’s, of the 20th century, worn themselves out and had nothing further to say to us.
Cows!
The Innocent Eye Test and detail, oil on canvas, 1981. Mark Tansey, born 1949, American. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
The Young Bull, 1647, oil on canvas.
Paulus Potter, baptized 1625, died 1654, Dutch. Mauritshuis, The Hague
Details of The Innocent Eye Test, oil on canvas, 1981. Mike Tansey, born 1949, American. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
In this painting of two cows confronting each other, Mark Tansey, himself an illustrator of note, pictures an experiment where his own painted cow, accompanied by the cow’s own offal attendant, is shown a painted cow in Paulus Potter’s 1643 The Young Bull (at the Mauritshuis, the Hague).
I take it that we are expected here to agree that Tansey’s cow adds nothing to the depiction of cowhood just as we are expected to see how unexcited Tansey’s cow is to meet his gloriously painted forbear.
The real point being, of course, that real cows might have a very different reaction to each other just as their real human depicters might have very different ways of representing these animals. And that we will enjoy and judge these depictions as we see fit.
Examples:
Young Herdsmen with Cows, 1655-60, oil on canvas
Albert Cuyp, 1620-1691, Dutch. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Cow in a Barn, oil on paper laid down on canvas, nd.
Camille Corot, 1796-1875, French. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Calling The Cows Home, 1872, oil on wood.
Jean-Francois Millet, 1814-1875, French. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Cow, oil on cigar-box top, 1876.
Edgar Degas, 1834-1917, French. Philadelphia Art Museum
Yellow Cow, 1911, oil on canvas.
Franz Marc, 1880-1916, German. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, founding collection.
Expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founding members of ‘The Blue Rider’.
Fighting Cows, 1911, oil on canvas.
Franz Marc, 1880-1916, German. Private collection on display, 2017, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Paternity, 1937, oil on canvas.
George Biddle, 1885-1973, American. Loaned by the artist’s family to the Woodmere Museum, Philadelphia in 2022
Cow with Parasol, 1946, oil on canvas.
Marc Chagall, 1887-1985, French. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Young Bull and detail, 1960, drybrush watercolour on paper.
Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American. Family collection on display at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in 2017.
Angus, 1974, oil on canvas.
Jamie Wyeth, American born 1946. Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA
A cow painted on a wall in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia, 2016; disappeared after 2020
The Metropolitan Museum of Art says that Mark Tansey is offering a critique of representational painting in modern art as a method of revitalizing painting.
An interesting word REVITALIZATION in this context because in its core are, of course, the words VITA (life) and VITAL (containing life).
As in paintings about real life in the real world populated by real beings experiencing that life in all manner of ways.
The life which is notably absent in this celebrated painting by Ad Reinhardt who said that this was the ultimate painting after which there would be no more.
Can anything be more lifeless than this all-monochrome black with no glint of anything else?
Ultimate Painting, 1963, oil on canvas.
Ad Reinhardt, 1913-1967, American. Collection of Virginia Dwan on exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Dead as a doornail. Nihilism triumphant.
So we are fortunate that, looking at Mr. Nickson’s bather, Ad Rheinhart took a turn down a dark cul-de-sac on that 100-year journey.
A huit clos, better.
The work of realist artists has, of course, never ceased even if few have been awarded the glittering prizes since the Abstract Expressionists seized the high ground in the late 1940s.
A Promise, 2020, acrylic on canvas.
Calida Rawles, American born 1976. Photo from the artist’s website.
Subway Ride, oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 2016. Josias Figreirido, a student in 2016 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia
Yvonne and James II, 2021, oil on canvas.
Jordan Casteel, American born 1989. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
The sitter’s wife, Yvonne, had recently died when this portrait was taken of a man in grief.
Girl on a Swing, 2004, oil on linen.
Cecily Brown, American born England 1969. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
The Deluge V, 2007, oil on canvas.
David Bates, American born 1952. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Hurricane Katrina from the viewpoint of an artist who has spent much of his life in the Gulf Coast.
Portrait of Mnonja, 2010, rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel.
Mickalene Thomas, American born 1971. Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
Morning Ritual, 2016, mixed media on canvas.
Mickael Thurin, American, born 1987. On display in 2017 at the Woodmere Museum of the Art, Philadelphia
Melanie in Repose, c. 2005, tempera on panel.
George A. (Frolic) Weymouth, 1936-2016, American. Brandywine Conservancy and Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
My View, 2012, oil on panel.
Charles Edward Harrigan, American born 1981. Woodmere Museum, Philadelphia
The artist acknowledges his debt to the Western artistic tradition represented here by Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1510).
Calm, 2014, pastel on paper.
Lesa Chittenden Lim. On display at the Woodmere Museum, Philadelphia in 2017
Two Trees, 2017, oil on canvas.
Peter Doig, British born 1959. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Peter Doig returned in the early 2000s to live in the Caribbean island of Trinidad where he spent his childhood.
This is a reflection of the island’s mixed heritage. The artist is looking east towards the African continent, ancestral home of many Trinidadians. The undercurrent of menace or dread relates to the forced migration of the Middle Passage.
Untitled (Painter), 2008, acrylic on PVC panel.
Kerry James Marshall, American born 1955. Exhibited in 2016/17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
The artist has worked to use the techniques of the Western graphic tradition – the historical tableau, portraiture, landscape, genre painting – to depict African Americans, their history and lives to the end of including his community in this tradition.
Untitled (Studio), 2014, acrylic on PVC panels. Kerry James Marshall, American born 1955. Exhibited in 2016/2017 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
The artist has worked to use the techniques of the Western graphic tradition – the historical tableau, portraiture, landscape, genre painting – to depict African Americans, their history and lives to the end of including his community in this tradition.
Saint Woman, 2015, oil on canvas.
Amy Sherald, American born 1973. Private collection loan to the Whitney Museum of (N.) American Art, NY in 2025
Grover Washington, Jr.
a mural of 2001 by Peter Pagas for the Mural Arts Program on North Broad Street, Philadelphia.
There are several thousand murals representing many different artistic styles in Philadelphia.
Won’t you celebrate with me, 2022, acrylic on canvas
Zéh Palito, Brazilian born 1986, active the US. Baltimore Art Museum
This is a modern-day reimagining of patrons enjoying the historic Colbrook Motel in Chester, Virginia. The motel is thought to be one of the first to be Black-owned in the US. It was included in The Negro Motorist Green Book which listed businesses and hotels deemed safe for Black American travelers during Jim Crow.
The title of the painting is the famous excerpt from a Lucille Clifton(1936-2010) poem:
“come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me/and has failed.”
And, so, welcome is this traditional making of an artist: a little girl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in the Spring of 2017
studying Fire, a limestone sculpture – one of the Four Elements – thought to be the work of Jean-Pierre Defrance, 1694-1768, French, in order to represent it in pencil on paper.
And welcome, also, all those still toiling in the vineyards of the real.
Contrary head winds are not subsiding despite the resurgence of representation and realism among minority artists in the United States
who would like to be seen, for the first time in hundreds of years,
as they see themselves. In a light as brilliant as this marvelous work.
Bather with Outstretched Arms, 1980-1981, liquitex on museum board.
Graham Nickson, British, 1946-2025. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC