Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Anne Ryan
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
41%
Still Life. 1942. Oil on canvasboard
It's like you can feel vanguard tendencies morphing into automatic moves and manners. The impasto that's all over, but especially in the background, has no logic or arrangement — it's just there, everywhere — and nowhere is there a passage of varied handling that might serve to accent it. It's an affectation, little more. And by '42, the table's tilt towards the picture plane is clearly a copied gesture. Nor do any of the picture's "decorative" elements (grids and stripes in the background, lines and dots near the foreground) seem to contribute to the layering of planes that is the painting's main proposition. Rather than push and pull between literal surface and illusionistic depth, everything sort of just hangs around. (2024)