New Link

I have checked out Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes before, and have no idea why I did not add him to the links.

In reading his blog today I found this tidbit about Paul Wonner. I agree with him wholeheartedly that Wonner's early work was interesting, with broad, painterly strokes, the verve of which contrasted with the sort of unease of his subject matter. Later, he started painting these qaint little still lives in crisply rendered lines. They are formulaic, boring, and rarely worth the time spent taking a good look at them (I have spent a lot of time at it and have come away feeling like I should have been looking at Thiebaud instead).

Wonner will ultimately be remembered as a third-tier Bay Area Figurative painter, who, along with Joan Brown and Nathan Oliveira, showed extraordinary promise in the heady days of early Bay Area Figurative Painting, but never was able to really keep it up.

For me, the Joan Brown retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California was a real eye-opener in this way (as a recent Nathan Oliveira show was), in that it was clear that at some point she lost her artistic vision and substituted it for an insipid private language of domestic affairs. For Oliveira, he has shown sparks here and there, but Brown never did (and quite frankly her Bay Area Figurative stuff was always second rate to begin with - I suspect that a great deal of her reputation hinged on the fact that she was a women and was married (for all of a year or so) to Manuel Neri).

Anyway, this Green fellow hits the nail on the head, so I am linking to him. Go read some good arts writing!