The Good Book: Barry Moser, Bookwright

In the beginning, God separated the light from the darkness, and it was good. Growing up a Bible-thumping, Southern-bred, segregation-approving Fundamentalist, Barry Moser became a licensed Methodist minister at the tender age of 19. Separating himself from what he saw as that dark genesis, Moser turned to art, eventually becoming an artist, an engraver, and a full-blown book designer. Although never giving up the Good Book entirely, Moser devoted his life to creating good books—works of art full of his illustrations designed, printed, and bound with the highest craftsmanship. In Barry Moser: Bookwright (at the Brandywine River Museum until May 22), the good book lives on in the age of the Kindle and the Nook. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Good Book: Barry Moser, Bookwright."

[Image: Barry Moser (B. 1940), Self Portrait with Burin (2nd State) (ca. 1987) (detail), wood engraving on paper, 10 ¼ x 8 ¼ inches, collection of the Brandywine River Museum, Gift of Justin Schiller, 1989.]

[Many thanks to the Brandywine River Museum for providing me with the image above and press materials related to Barry Moser: Bookwright, which runs through until May 22, 2011. Many thanks also to Kessler Brothers for providing me with a review copy of their documentary film A Thief Among the Angels: Barry Moser and the Making of the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible.]

Full House: Cezanne’s Card Players at the Met

Paul Cézanne painted slowly. Very slowly. The fruit in his still lives would ripen and even rot as he worked. Hortense, first his mistress and later his wife, visibly suffers in his portraits of her (although some of that may be due to their difficult union). Cézanne’s father agree to pose only if he could read a newspaper, which the painter impishly changed from the conservative paper his father favored to a radical rag. Only Mont Sainte-Victoire provided the perfectly patient subject. But before Cézanne met his mountain, he looked outside his immediate family to the “extended” family of his father’s employees on their estate just outside Aix-en-Provence. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York brings together Cézanne’s paintings featuring his favorite setting for those workers—playing cards. Cézanne’s Card Players, which runs through May 8, 2011, brings the “full house” of this subject and invites us to join in the game of painting Cézanne played through these players. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Full House."

[Image: Paul Cézanne (French, Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906 Aix-en-Provence). The Card Players, 1890–1892. Oil on canvas. 25 3/4 x 32 1/4 in. (65.4 x 81.9 cm). Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]

I'll Be Your Mirror: Michael Fried’s “The Moment of Caravaggio”

“I'll be your mirror,” The Velvet Underground sang in the song of the same name, “Reflect what you are, in case you don't know.” In The Moment of Caravaggio, Michael Fried argues that the art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio captivates us by reflecting back at us the interior life we the viewer project into it. Fried adds to that dynamic another “moment,” in which the artist himself finds himself captured by his own painting, which he must cast off if it is to live as an independent art work. One of the most intriguing and subtle art critics writing today, Fried casts new light into the work of the master of chiaroscuro and presents a fresh approach to understanding just why Caravaggio’s art lingers in the mind and holds our attention even today, four centuries after his death. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "I'll Be Your Mirror."

[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio.]