Stewed beef

There is no emoticon for the exasperation I am feeling!
Once again the desk top machine is on the fritz, and the second I thought I knew what to do about it, things got worse. Now windows is giving me another of those incomprehensible error messages and I’m typing this on the laptop, which is oh so cute but oh so outdated. After discussing with my shrink the way all of this was related to some of my problematic sexual boundries (don’t ask), I decided to not spend the day freaked out about it but rather to go see the Boucher drawing show at the Frick. Of course this was interesting, even though it confirmed my distaste for Boucher, who seems incapable of rendering a face that contains any emotion beyond a simpering bovine lust. This was made all the more glaring by the inclusion in the show of several drawings where he displays a crisp, lively eye in the depiction of things like chickens and courtyards. When he attempts to be serious everything devolves into mush, dough-like anatomy whipped into furious “s” shaped compsitions. The drawing show is downstairs at the Frick and upstairs, as part of the permanent collection is a Boucher room with allegories of the arts and sciences enacted by putti, and it is clearly the ideological forerunner of the muppet babies.
The rest of the Frick was a joy, the paintings hung with little or no explanitory text, which makes it much easier to treat each one as a discovery. Today I felt good about Reynolds over Gainsbourough, and Velasquez over El Greco. It was startling to see the Franz Hals portraits of anxious burghers echoed in the portrait of Washington that faces down his British contemporaries in the ajoining room.

Does sneering at a centuries old frenchman make me feel better about my technological ineptitude? Sadly no.

0 Comments +

  1. clearly the ideological forerunner of the muppet babies

    You said “simpering”. That’s one of my favourite words. But I prefer when it’s not associated with “lust”.

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