A Tranquil Life

AG2025_DSF6359a
AG2025_DSF6359a

Juliana Halpert on LACMA (e-flux)

“The “synchronic museum,” as he calls its new alternative, “would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial.””


Ne fais jamais de peinture si tu veux vivre tranquille.
Corot, to a friend

The most inviting landscape, where we say,
“Here we may rest and make this landscape ours,”
For him is apprehension. To convey
A moment of its meaning calls on powers
He sometimes doubts possessing. In his hand
The palette with its colored spots and smears
Seems to match nothing. On the easel’s bland
And vacant canvas not a line appears
To guide him. While we gaze and shift our eyes
Accumulating all there is to see,
His fuller sight begins to realize
A world brought into being anxiously,
Where structured shapes and contoured colors show
A calmer scene than any we could know.

Thomas Carper, The Tranquil Life

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