Jed Perl: Individualism of Matisse & Renoir

Once again, this time in The New Republic, Jed Perl illuminates the world of art for us in a way that is totally accessible to laymen like me, who know what we like but are far from experts in art history and art criticism. I have been following the columns of Jed Perl in TNR and in New York Review of Books for several years now and continue to be impressed by the exceptional sensitivity Mr. Perl exhibits in his writing and the way he makes the art word accessible to me in a way that no other art critic or writer on art has done. In this column he writes of two exhibitions, one at MoMA on Matisse and the other on Renoir at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He illuminates for me modernism in the art world and what he considers to be a new angle increasingly used to understand modern art and interpret its meaning for each of us in a way that goes further than likes and dislikes.

Mr. Perl debunks what has been for such a long time the conventional or popular interpretation of 20th century art as an evolution toward abstraction and suggests instead that pay more particular attention to the artists themselves and the role that their individual artistic temperament played in the evolution of their own art. He asks us to consider rejecting the ideas about avant-garde and of the labelling of our modern artists as radical or conservative, and focus on the role their individual temperaments played in discovering and selecting the rules they chose to apply to their creative efforts.

I urge anyone even moderately interested in art to read this article in the August 12 issue of TNR and of anything that Jed Perl writes. He has a gift for conveying to us the issues related to art and art history that bring all these artists to life for me in a way so vivid and accessible that I immediately wanted to arrange a trip to Philadelphia and New York City to see these two exhibitions before they close and move on.