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COPYRIGHT 2006 Foundation for Cultural Review
An actual "battle of styles," as for instance between realism and abstraction, is desirable only to those who thrive on a feeling of partisanship. Both directions are valid and useful--and freedom to produce them and enjoy them should be protected as an essential liberty. There are, however, serious reasons for taking sides when one kind of art or another is dogmatically asserted to be the only funicular up Parnassus or, worse, when it is maliciously attacked by the ignorant, the frightened, the priggish, the opportunistic, the bigoted, the backward, the vulgar or the venal. Then those who love art or spiritual freedom cannot remain neutral.--Alfred Barr, 1949
If you like your story of art told neat, start to finish, be sure not to visit the Water Street Atelier. Once you open the door to this wrinkle in the storyline, the chapters of art may never fit together quite so well again. Here, behind the elegant brick facade of a carriage house situated along an exclusive residential block on Manhattan's Upper East Side, an unmarked enameled door opens onto a room that resembles more an ideal vision of the artist's studio than anything you might expect to sec this side of the nineteenth century.
Tacked to the back of a bookcase, facing you upon arrival, a display of small portraits painted in a realistic manner repeats a similar arrangement found along every wall and on every shelf and propped up in every open space. Plaster busts of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, models of the human skeleton and human musculature, casts of angels, and a relief depicting the Three Graces: all are mixed in among the paintings and a dusty assortment of art books. Above, dark fabrics drape down from the ceiling, shielding and directing the light in the room onto a raised platform of plywood, used during studio hours for the display of nude models.
At any given time, a large easel or two may be positioned beside this proscenium. Here, half-imagined forms of naked flesh slowly take shape on canvas, one limb at a time. Throw out your assumptions about art world inevitabilities, about postmodernism and the...
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