What Paintings Touch You Most Deeply?

A Saturday Prompt

Paintings by Otto Dix, Edward Hopper and Jean-Michel Basquiat (left to right).

Let’s take a moment to exhale, shall we? We have been, by necessity, paying maximum attention to an accelerated news cycle. We are dealing with a hostile regime determined to limit our speech, control our actions and dull our passions. Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts tells us that he imagines he can determine our culture.

Just look at his executive order this week seeking to restrict funding for programs and exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution that confront issues of race and troubling Western narratives—and focus instead on “American greatness.” He of all people imagines he and his regime should decide what it means to determine the “rightful place” of the Smithsonian—comprised of 21 museums, libraries and research centers—“as a symbol of inspiration.”

What nonsense.

That’s why I’m focusing for a moment on works of art—paintings in particular—that nourish, provide strength, give insight and offer uplift. We need our collective power, we need beauty to sustain our energy and we must secure the freedom of thought to engage the full diversity of people and ideas and artistic expression that defines our world. Hitler and the Nazis may have succeeded for a time at removing works of art that they determined to be “degenerate,” but we are not about to let some depraved two-bit conman determine what we love.

Allow me a few personal choices, including nearly everything that Edward Hopper painted. (I particularly love Automat from 1927, seen above, first displayed on Valentine’s Day.) His paintings are quiet. They are calm. They appear to be unruffled. But what makes them so remarkable is how he captures feelings of loneliness, isolation and disappointment—far from the garish world of “AMERICAN GREATNESS” that seeks to silence these all too real and human feelings. Hopper’s paintings always feel like a meditation on inner struggles, even when there are no human figures in the work.

On a very different emotional plane, I’m always moved by the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Hollywood Africans from 1983, seen above, is just one of many that touch me.) Basquiat takes all those inner conflicts and societal struggles and brings them out into a brilliantly colorful, complicated, free-associative and often painful display of the worlds that he confronts. His Neo-Expressionist works touch me—and hit the art world so hard in the 1980s—because he didn’t hold back. He didn’t soft-pedal. He shared with us his unbridled desires and suffering and dreams.

And then there are the German Expressionists, painters like Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Ernst Kirchner. (Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden from 1926, seen above, is one of his many epoch-defining paintings.) Their work was particularly influenced by the horrors of World War I, and they sought to externalize the psychological and the emotional and depict what they felt and experienced with broad strokes and strong, often garish and unreal colors. Some of the paintings are both hard to look at and hard to turn away from, demonstrating their capacity to capture a period of devastating violence and also presciently articulate the emotional upheavals that eventually led to Nazi Germany.

There are so many others that I could include, but I want to hear from you. What paintings touch you most deeply? And why? Maybe you want to focus on one work or a whole genre or the full portfolio of a particular artist. Maybe you’d like to mention where you saw the work or who you shared the experience with. Perhaps you’d like to focus on an art work that you love that isn’t a painting. Feel free!

As always, I look forward to reading your observations and the opportunity for this community to learn from each other. Please do be respectful in your remarks. Trolling will not be tolerated.

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