the juggler

…”when you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. it’s called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don’t. here is the list of the symptoms, and don’t worry – loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. just remember one fact – loneliness will pass. you will survive and you will be a better human for it.” …‎”remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. life’s cruelest irony.”- douglas coupland

Chagall, the Juggler. 1943. ---Cubism in the hands of Picasso was never really my thing. For one, I felt like Picasso was merely emulating a child by doing whatever he wanted and then somehow he got extremely famous. In the hand’s of Marc Chagall, however, the vibrant colours and not-too-out-of-place discontinuous parts of the image strike a vivid impression on the senses. When Picasso does Cubism, everything is out of place to the point that it is sometimes hard to tell what the image actually represents. When Chagall does it, there is enough of the image that is out of place so that the mind doesn’t see it as natural, but nothing is so overtly out of place....Read More:http://artisticthings.com/there-arent-six-sides-to-cubism/

Donald Kuspit:It is noteworthy that Chagall, Modigliani and Soutine — all the peintres maudits — have been called sentimentalists, but if so they are not as cursed as they have been said to be. Sentimentality may seem like softness and naivet, but then the hardness and coldness of formalism suggests failed humanity. And prudery: what is more puritan than Malevichs anhedonic square? It is absence disguised as presence — a hollow godhead misrepresented as a cosmic essence. It has become an academic symbol of modernism, suggesting that it was never sacrosanct to begin with. But what is sentimentality? It signals the need for love — and both Chagall and Modigliani are among the few modern masters who admit to the need and attempt to represent love (not simply sexuality, as Picasso does), and who even manage to convey a loving attitude to the human subject (as Picasso rarely does) — however stymied the need, ironically by the needy sentimentalist himself.

The psychoanalyst Edgar Levenson defines sentimentality as an investment in emotion as an experience, rather than a transaction. The sentimentalist wishes to feel loving, to experience himself as a loving person, rather than to love someone. It is love in the intransitive state.* The sentimentalist is a narcissist, as Levenson says, more interested in the sensation of loving than in actually loving someone in particular. Don Juan is a sentimentalist, unable to sustain a relationship with the women he has sex with, let alone to love them and care for them (like Picasso). If this is true, Chagall was never a sentimentalist, as his marriage to Bella indicates, but a true lover. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-27-04.asp