This week, I’m casting the pod with a congeries of crack art critics from The New Criterion: James Panero, Benjamin Riley and Andrew Shea. In the background, instead of sleigh bells and carol singers, you can dimly hear the smashing of plates and the roar of laughter as The New Criterion’s Christmas party gets under way. Meanwhile, the Three Scrooges of art criticism, warmed by the heat of single microphone, say ‘Bah! Humbug!’ to critical fashion. Like all critics, these three have their convictions, but they can plead extenuating circumstances. For this was a vintage year for great drawing and painting.
2018 began with two excellent shows at the Met in New York, Michelangelo’s drawings and the first Delacroix exhibition in decades. As James Panero notes, Michelangelo is ‘sculptural’ on paper. James also explains what that means, and how you don’t know Delacroix until you’ve seen his paint up close. Andy Shea, meanwhile, makes the case for another artist of the flesh, Chaim Soutine, whose flayed animals were shown at the Jewish Museum at the same time as his studies of the human animal were shown at the Courtauld in London.
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Ben Riley has been following the auctions, and notes that while ‘Corot’s Women’ was a success at the National Gallery in Washington DC, a Corot went for only $60,000 at auction earlier this month, while a portrait of horse flesh by Sir Alfred Munnings went for $307,000, ten times its reserve price.
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