Brush Strokes

Vincent Van Gogh didn't just work at things - he attacked them, eulogizes his grieving brother Theo in the Next Arena's revival of “Vincent.” As performed by French-born actor Jean-Michel Richaud, this insightful and often moving 1981 solo show penned by Leonard Nimoy transcends the usual clichés surrounding the high-maintenance artist with the tortured relationship to his aural appendage. Nimoy knows from ears, of course, but his script looks beyond merely sensational biographical episodes to the unifying themes in three principal facets of Vincent's adult life: God, love and art. As Theo admits during an imaginary tribute conducted a week after his brother's death, Vincent pursued all three with perhaps an overdeveloped sense of drama, but always with passion.

What is it, exactly, about Van Gogh? For those of us with a vested interest in contemporary art, who spend much of our time immersed in the work of artists most Americans have never heard of, it is an important question to ponder from time to time - one that the Norton Simon Museum's temporary installation of an 1889 self-portrait on loan from the National Gallery of Art calls again to the fore. There is no more familiar face in all of modern art history: the piercing blue eyes; the gaunt, sallow features; the imagined spectacle of a severed ear (turned discretely away from the viewer in this, as in most, variations)

What is it, exactly, about Van Gogh? For those of us with a vested interest in contemporary art, who spend much of our time immersed in the work of artists most Americans have never heard of, it is an important question to ponder from time to time - one that the Norton Simon Museum's temporary installation of an 1889 self-portrait on loan from the National Gallery of Art calls again to the fore. There is no more familiar face in all of modern art history: the piercing blue eyes; the gaunt, sallow features; the imagined spectacle of a severed ear (turned discretely away from the viewer in this, as in most, variations)

Vincent Van Gogh didn't just work at things - he attacked them, eulogizes his grieving brother Theo in the Next Arena's revival of “Vincent.” As performed by French-born actor Jean-Michel Richaud, this insightful and often moving 1981 solo show penned by Leonard Nimoy transcends the usual clichés surrounding the high-maintenance artist with the tortured relationship to his aural appendage. Nimoy knows from ears, of course, but his script looks beyond merely sensational biographical episodes to the unifying themes in three principal facets of Vincent's adult life: God, love and art. As Theo admits during an imaginary tribute conducted a week after his brother's death, Vincent pursued all three with perhaps an overdeveloped sense of drama, but always with passion.

Analia Saban went to art school at the height of the recent market boom, when it was not uncommon for students, particularly in UCLA's prestigious painting program, to be fielding offers from galleries and selling work directly out of their studios. It had a significant impact on the direction of her career, though not because she profited by it at the time. Indeed, she had a rough go of it. Raised in Buenos Aires, she came to Los Angeles in 2002 by way of a small college in New Orleans, where she studied video art primarily.

William Wilson writes in his article about Van Gogh: "You can see madness trying to swallow the artist at Arles in his weird 'Night Cafe' and the frantic brush-work and whirl-pool space of many another picture," fueling the myth of the artist's "madness" ("The $40-Million Obscenity," April 5). Would Wilson so categorically see madness in Van Gogh's brush-strokes if the painter's unstable mental condition had not been so clearly documented? Can Wilson diagnose the mental state of other lesser known artists by their brush strokes?

I heard that Conrad was retiring and tears welled up in my eyes; a quiet, muffled curse slipped out between my lips, and an overwhelming sense of loss steamrolled over me. Other times when I had felt like this were when Hank Aaron retired, Muhammad Ali quit boxing, and Sandy Kofax left baseball. For like no other political cartoonist ever, Paul Conrad hit more home runs, threw more knockout blows and pitched more strikes at the hypocritical, the sententious and the unjust. He can say more with a few brush strokes than some reporters can with 5,000 words.

In discussing two of the Music Center Opera's productions of "Tristan und Isolde," Martin Bernheimer's review of David Hockney's sets ("Second Look at Music Center 'Tristan,' " Dec. 21) suffer from the perspective of viewing the proceedings on the stage too closely. I attended both performances critiqued by Bernheimer, but unlike him, I was sitting in the uppermost balcony for both performances, rows Q and N. Our differences in viewing the stage are like the different perspectives an art viewer gets when he or she looks at the brush strokes up close or stands back for an overall view.

George Page's constructions attempt to fuse elements of painting, sculpture and architecture in order to create a tension between the intuitive gesture of Expressionism and the rational geometry of linear forms in space. This conflict has become something of a staple since the heyday of the New York School, as artists struggle to synthesize the feverish transcendence of action painting with the formal purism of modernist abstraction.

I must take strong exception to Ronald Martinetti's statement (letters, Dec. 25) that art museums such as the Getty Center are "anachronisms." To contend that a computer screen can replace the "live" experience of art is absurd. Aside from the critical fact that no monitor can reproduce the nuances of texture, color and scale that can be appreciated only when the original work of art is at hand, a computer cannot replicate the emotional pleasure of being in the physical presence of the original work or the joy of being in a beautiful setting among other people who love art, both of which add immeasurably to the quality ofthe viewer's experience.

Analia Saban went to art school at the height of the recent market boom, when it was not uncommon for students, particularly in UCLA's prestigious painting program, to be fielding offers from galleries and selling work directly out of their studios. It had a significant impact on the direction of her career, though not because she profited by it at the time. Indeed, she had a rough go of it. Raised in Buenos Aires, she came to Los Angeles in 2002 by way of a small college in New Orleans, where she studied video art primarily.

The six directors who came together to talk to The Envelope about their craft all made fiction films, even if some of their stories were inspired by real people. While David Fincher's "The Social Network" and Tom Hooper's "The King's Speech" are based on the respective lives of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Britain's King George VI, the other four films are wholly imagined tales: Ethan (and Joel) Coen's "True Grit," Ben Affleck's "The Town," Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are All Right" and Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan.

Milan ART NOUVEAU botanical prints at Prada, hand-painted brush strokes at Dolce & Gabbana, luminous blocks of color at Jil Sander -- fashion week here was an Italian renaissance, the runways filled with moving artwork. After so many seasons of producing sexy, salable merchandise and leaving Paris to lead the way, designers launched an art attack that proved Milan is no longer a second city. And why not?

THOMAS EAKINS created some of the most iconic images of American art. Even people who shun museums recognize the nobly lighted forehead of a surgeon turning to speak to a gallery of students while his fingers hold a bloody scalpel. You can buy a mouse pad with the glorious image of Max Schmitt sculling on Pennsylvania's Schuylkill River. Eakins was of the generation of another American original, Winslow Homer.

San Diego-born, New York-based artist David Reed had a homecoming of sorts in 1998 with "David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Aptly titled, the exhibition surveyed Reed's oeuvre of fluid paint troweled into loopy compositions, as well as his experiments with video.

Artists hoped to achieve many things during the Depression. Some were determined to shed light on the desperate poverty gripping the nation. Others were bent on finding beauty amid all the suffering. Still others hoped to persuade their fellow citizens to renounce capitalism and embrace Marxism. Above all, most just wanted to survive. Thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and other programs, they did.

Neville Gerson's paintings, now at the G. Childress Gallery in Ojai, speak softly but insistently. They convey an abstract language of knotty linear activity, a network of squiggles. And there is life, real and imagined, in those squiggles. Gerson, born in Scotland and now based in Thousand Oaks, showed his work earlier this year in Santa Monica's Bergamot Station. His appearance at Childress makes for a refreshing departure--normally the work here leans away from abstraction.

Fabian Marcaccio takes a scattershot approach to abstract painting, aiming in his target's general direction rather than trying to hit its bull's-eye. Titled "Paint-Zone L.A.," his frenetic installation at L.A. Louver Gallery proposes that what takes place in painting's general vicinity is more interesting than what happens at its center.

Warren Logan's hands skim the 15th century marble bust, tracing the lifeless eyes, the slightly agape mouth, the precisely chiseled fur. He is blind, but he can see. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's new touch tour is among programs at more than 100 museums nationwide that attempt to do what once was thought impossible: make art accessible -- even, in a sense, visible -- to those with little or no sight. "I get a good picture of the art," 14-year-old Logan said after a recent tour.

They lived as if in two separate yet parallel universes, drawn together by a single fascination: the rugged American West. Paragons of popular Western art, Frederic Remington was a Yale University-trained artist who lived and worked in New York and Charles M. Russell was a Montana wrangler and self-taught artist. Their work illustrated the tales of cowboys, soldiers and Native Americans while molding a nation's visual impression of itself from the late 1800s to the present.