This is not a thoughtful list. I’m just throwing it together because something made me think about John Singer Sargent, and that made me want to do a Top Five list, so I’m assembling this hastily because I’ve got a lot to do today.
It’s also not an honest list, because an honest list of favorites would consist entirely of people in my family, but my wife would give me trouble if I showed any of her watercolors, so consider this a Top Five List of Painters to Whom I Am Not Related by Blood or Marriage.
Maybe I’ll do a more thoughtful one later.
Here goes:
- John Singer Sargent. Y’all are probably tired of him because I know I’ve mentioned him before, such as when we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Now I’ve gotta to BACK to Boston because I just learned about his Triumph of Religion set of murals that he spent the last 29 years of his life trying to finish. I love his range, as well as his mastery in achieving he’s trying to do. He’s called an impressionist, but he’s good at whatever style you choose. Check out his use of light in this, or the hypnotic eyes in this. And dig the shadows in my very favorite, El Jaléo, which I encountered at Isabella’s museum.
- Caravaggio. I learned about Caravaggio from a print that hangs in a hallway of my church, The Calling of St. Matthew. That’s it at the top of this post.
- Vermeer. Everybody talks about the Girl with the Pearl Earring, but my fave is Het melkmeisje, which I saw at the Rijsmuseum in Amsterdam. It’s not very big, but it is very impressive. I saw a lot of Rembrandt there, too — some greats including The Night Watch and those dudes from the Dutch Masters cigar box, but that would be so cliche to choose him, right?
- Anders Zorn. OK this is almost the same as picking Sargent, because I mistake his work for Sargent’s sometimes, but I like his work on its own. Especially his portait of the aforementioned Isabella (which is better than Sargent’s portrait of her), and The Omnibus. Although, as I’ve said before, I like George William Joy’s version of the omnibus them better (more communitarian, or something — more people, anyway). Y’all know how I love public transportation. And though I definitely don’t love tobacco, I like this one as well.
- Boticelli. Nope, not the Venus one. My fave is Primavera, especially this detail.
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That’s it. Thoughts? I know a lot of this is repetitive, but I don’t remember doing a Top Five on painters, and am curious to see what y’all will tell me I left out.
Don’t mention Michelangelo, though. I’ve got a bone to pick with him, which I’ll explain in a subsequent post…
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And yeah, I’ve got a bunch of artists swimming in my head that I left off. Manet. Whistler (who did some pretty good stuff, not just his mom), Da Vinci and so forth. I kind of like the Pre-Raphaelites sometimes.
And of course some of my friends will point out that I’m sort of Eurocentric, and yes I am. I’ve lived my life in the West, and so those names and images come to mind more readily. If I were trying to compiled a “diverse” list, I’d probably mention Hokusai. Although, as I said, I’m a Westerner and have Western tastes. His Wave is impressive, but not my favorite style.
Insist that I included a woman, and I’d say Mary Cassatt. Ask me for a black painter and I’d mention that I really love Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Annunciation.
But they don’t make the Top Five. Or at least they didn’t in this hurried version…
Taking a break from my reading assignment for this last week of my linguistics course, it hits me that I don’t need to write a separate post to explain my objection to calling Michelangelo one of the greatest. I can do it here.
Just the other day, I was looking for something unrelated to this subject on the blog. I saw a painting I had grabbed to illustrate a post about the Garden of Eden. I refer to this image, Michelangelo’s “The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise.”
There was something really off about the image, something I had half-perceived many times before, but then it hit me: Michelangelo couldn’t draw men and women — at least, he couldn’t do so in a way that you could tell them apart, unless you saw the breasts on the woman and the man’s junk.
I had often noticed how naked bodies didn’t look quite right in images that old, but chalked it up to changing conceptions of ideal body shape over time.
But now I saw it in different terms — if you put black bars over the chest, crotch areas and heads (so you couldn’t see the woman’s long hair), they were exactly the same. Legs, arms, shoulders, lower torsos, buttocks, etc. They looked like the overall skeletal and muscular structures were drawn with the same stencil or rubber stamp. Speaking of arms, check out Eve’s Schwarzeneggeresque left arm as she reaches out to take the apple?
The men are bad enough. How could he sculpt a natural (though idealized) David, but painted men to look like Neanderthals or troglodytes?
Of course, some men ARE built like that. Imagine a former bodybuilder who’s let himself go a bit. He would look like a Michelangelo man. But to draw the woman the SAME WAY, when you’re trying to depict two people who are the archetypes of male and female among humans? That’s crazy.
Of course, I took a moment to Google this observation, and learned that practically the whole rest of the human global population had already noticed the master’s inability to draw women. Of course, some writers chalked it up to Michelangelo being homosexual, and therefore having no experience with or interest in naked female forms.
They may be right, to some extent. But who cares? This guy’s supposed to be one of the great artists of all time, and he couldn’t draw a woman’s body? He couldn’t bring himself to glance at one, just for the sake of accuracy? For that matter, he couldn’t make the man look more realistic? Come on. Adam hadn’t been lifting anvils for a living. In Eden, he’d done nothing more strenuous than lying around eating grapes he didn’t have to grow.
The guy couldn’t draw humans, so he doesn’t make the Top Five…
Of course, you might say, “Hey, nobody could make the human body look realistic back in the day?” True, there are a lot of BAD nudes in paintings that are centuries old. But some aren’t too bad. A lot of it can be explained by changing fashions in body shapes, as I indicated early in the previous comment. A lot more can be explained by the lack of photography, combined with (I suppose) nude models not being as readily available in the Renaissance as they were in Paris in 1890.
Speaking of the Renaissance… maybe I should bump Botticelli from the list, too, on similar grounds. I was just particularly irritated by something I’d just noticed about Michelangelo when I wrote the post…
My top 5 would be Hieronymus Bosch, Monet, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Titian, and Tang Yin (actually classic Chinese landscape painting in general – I grew up near the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has an excellent Chinese painting collection. It was free, and my graduate school was right next door so I visited whenever I could spare a moment). Others in my head would not only include the ones you mention in your posts but artists like Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Degas, Thomas Eakins, Van Gogh, Winslow Homer, Jasper Johns, Matisse, Monet, Norman Rockwell, J. M.W. Turner, Titian, and Andrew Wyeth. If asked about female artists I would mention Frida Kahlo, Angelica Kauffman, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, Berthe Morisot, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Black artists would certainly include Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.