Quilt. From Mississippi, 1930s-’40s (wool)

Via Ricco Maresca Gallery

“Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 70” By Robert Motherwell (1961)

David Levine on the mess that Mark Rothko’s death made. Fascinating read.

“Untitled (Medici Princess)” By Joseph Cornell (1948)

"Reflection with Two Children" (1965)

Lucian Freud, one of the great painters of our time, died yesterday.

Lying by the Rags (1989-90)

He was 88.

Freud’s work is stunning.

"Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" (1995)

He painted the human figure like nobody else and was an artist who got better with age.

"Double Portrait" (1985-86)

"Reflection...self-portait" (1985)

Rest in Peace.

Louis had skills. These are his collages.

A young Richard Diebenkorn channels Edward Hopper

“Watermelon Slices,” By Wayne Thiebaud (1961)

Rest in Peace, Cy Twombly:

Pictures by Richard Diebenkorn.

“Boston Street Scene,” By David Park (1954)

Here is a nice appreciation of Park from The New York Review of Books:

David Park (1911–1960) is one of those artists who isn’t widely known but whose work inspires a special loyalty and warmth of feeling among his admirers. The partisan flavor his very name can arouse is partly dependent, of course, on his not being a household name to begin with. But Park, who was based in Berkeley, California, and was, along with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, one of the leading lights of what has been called “Bay Area” painting in the 1950s, makes some of us always eager to see more of his work and learn more about him because his best pictures have a particular tenderness and sense of gravity—a note that sets him apart from near-contemporaries of his such as Alice Neel, Fairfield Porter, or Alex Katz.

Not that there is anything sentimental or literary—or modest in scope—about Park’s painting. In his pictures of, say, people at a dining-room table, young men walking, musicians at work, or in his portraits, he doesn’t spell out specific expressions. Most of his energy has gone into his feeling for the shifts in the inner space of an image and for the creation of light, which he can make sizzlingly bright or glowingly soft. A person’s eyes, in a Park, might be no more than dots. Yet the magic of his brushy and muscular paintings, often marked by hot reds, yellows, and oranges, is that the people in them have psychologically full presences, and we are pulled into the reflective spirit of the images.

My favorite painter Richard Diebenkorn once did a cool series of small paintings from Ocean Park. Like this one, Cigar Box Lid #6 (1979).

“Figure on a Porch,” By Richard Diebenkorn (1959)

There are nine days left to see the Romare Bearden show at the Michael Rosenfeld gallery on 57th street.

From the New York Times review by Roberta Smith:

Romare Bearden (1911-88) spent more than 30 years striving to be a great artist, and in the early 1960s, when he took up collage in earnest, he became one. A small exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, organized to celebrate the centennial of Bearden’s birth, delivers this message with unusual clarity. It contains only 21 collages, all superb, in an intimate context that facilitates savoring their every formal twist and narrative turn, not to mention the ingenious mixing of mediums that takes them far beyond collage.

The works at Rosenfeld were made from 1964 to 1983. Some are not much larger than sheets of typing paper; others are more than four feet on a side. Their suavely discordant compositions involve both black-and-white and color photographs and occasional bits of printed fabric; almost all depict some scene of black life, past or present or imagined.

Highly recommended.

This week, Gary Smith profiled the Phillies starting rotation in SI’s Baseball Preview issue.

And in the latest edition of the New York Times Magazine, Pat Jordan takes on Philadelphia’s four aces:

Mike Schmidt was standing behind a batting cage, still as trim as during his playing days. A handsome, middle-aged man with swept-back, silvery hair and a thick mustache. I asked him what he thought of the four Phillies pitchers.

“Well,” he said, “now when the Phillies come to town, the other team knows they’re being challenged by four No. 1 pitchers. They have to amp up their mental game. I used to see my at-bats the night before a game when I laid my head down on the pillow. Gibson, Seaver, Ryan. I had to have a plan. When I went to Houston, they had three good pitchers. The fourth was Nolan Ryan. I could go to sleep with the other three, but Ryan kept me awake. Ryan! Ryan! Ryan! My plan was, don’t miss his fastball if he threw it over the plate. If he got two strikes on me, I’d have to face his curveball.” He turned and looked at me with his small blue eyes, which had fear in them. “Ryan was scary!” he said. He shook his head, as if seeing Ryan on the mound. Ryan began his motion and fired the ball at his head. Schmidt had a split second to make a decision. Was it a 100 m.p.h. fastball that could kill him if it hit him in the head, or was it that wicked curveball? If he dove away from the plate and the pitch was a curveball that broke over the plate, he’d look like a fool and a coward. But if it wasn’t a curveball, if it was that 100 m.p.h. fastball, and he didn’t dive away from the plate . . . well, he didn’t even want to think about that.

“Ryan, Gibson, Seaver, they made you defensive,” he said. “Does that make sense? You were afraid of the ball. There’s no fear of the ball today with cutters, splitters and changeups.”

“What about the Phillies’ four pitchers?” I said.

“They’re not scary,” he said. “Even if they all win 20 games, the Phillies don’t have a pitcher who strikes fear in a hitter.”

Two very different takes on “the best rotation in baseball” from two very different writers.

And while we are talking pitching, here’s Steve Rushin’s piece on the Braves’ five aces from the 1993 SI Baseball Preview.

There was a nice, long appreciation of the late Edward Gorey in the Times a few weeks ago:

Intriguingly, explanations for the mounting popularity of Gorey’s art rarely touch on its air of hidden, maybe even unknowable meaning. Whatever Gorey’s work appears to be about, it’s forever insinuating, in its poker-faced way, that it’s really, truly about something else. The philosopher Jacques Derrida might have said it is this very elusiveness — the sense that meaning can never be pinned down by language — that is Gorey’s overarching point.

For his part, Gorey, who rolled his eyes at anyone looking for deep meaning in his work, would doubtless have groaned (theatrically) at any attempt to make intellectual sense of his posthumous popularity.

As he liked to say, “When people are finding meaning in things — beware.”

Excellent.

de Kooning detail…

Ocean Park 49 (1972), By Richard Diebenkorn

There was a terrific article on Wayne Thiebaud in the Times yesterday:

Jock Reynolds, now the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, recalled his first day of class, when Professor Thiebaud asked his students to produce a pencil and paper. “What followed was a remarkably lucid lecture on where to buy the best and cheapest salami, cheese, coffee, fruit, bread, cakes, and wine, things he insisted would significantly enrich the quality of our lives,” Mr. Reynolds said.

Later Mr. Reynolds realized that his professor was sharing more than a shopping list. “He was giving his students direct insights into the very subject matter that was inspiring his own art; the frosted cakes, cream pies, lollipops and the trays of herring and sardines he was transforming, through the skilled application of paint onto canvas, into the most tactile and sensuous visual compositions imaginable.”

Mr. Thiebaud’s favorite class to teach was Beginning Drawing. “You really see people transformed,” he said. “Teaching it has a big fatigue factor. But once they get a sense of it, it’s like heroin.”

Mr. de Kooning