The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Greek sculpture at the Met
2022.8.2
Thank you, Carol Diamond, for posting these great photos of the painted renditions of ancient Greek sculpture. I have braced myself for decades in preparation to see what had been billed as the garish taste of our artistic ancestors, and garish the work is. The main problem I felt when I saw these pieces at the museum is what our contemporary painters did with the faces. These have a glossy, plastic quality that's quite different from the matte clothing that feels somewhat respectful to the marble surfaces. The faces look like kindergarten children painted them, having no sensitivity to the lines and certainly no feeling expressed. From other forms of colored art still extant it's clear to me the ancient Greek artists knew how to express feeling through color and knew how to depict the human face. I find it hard to belief they set aside this knowledge when they worked on large-scale sculpture. The way our experts painted these ancient pieces reminds me of the horrendous restoration work done in Italy in the 1990s where to my eye at least the Botticelli's looked like they were repainted with straight red, yellow and blue house paint.