The Struggle for Reality: Giacometti and the Impossible Real

In Robert Hughes' article for Time magazine, written only 8 years after the artist's death, Hughes articulates Giacometti's struggle to make meaningful marks. The article sorts through common misconceptions, and also, indirectly, addresses the struggle to create.

...The painting('s)... real subject is the artist's lifelong obsession as a sculptor: the enormous difficulty of seeing anything clearly at all and the near impossibility of truthfully remaking what is seen into a lump of clay or a scribble on paper. Giacometti saw his own efforts as condemned to frustration. "There is no hope of achieving what I want, of expressing my vision of reality. I go on painting and sculpting because I am curious to know why I fail."...

       - Robert Hughes, Art: An Obsession with Seeing, Time Magazine, April 8, 1974

Link Full Text
Image: Giacometti, Head of Diego, Oil/Canvas, 1961

Hans Holbein and Portraiture -"Clear Eye, Flawless Touch"

Portrait of Sir John Godsalve. Black and coloured chalks, watercolour and bodycolour, brush, pen and ink on pink-primed paper, 14.5"× 11.6", Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, 1532-33.

...Nobody, one may morosely predict, will ever draw the human face as well as this again. The tradition is cut, the bow unstrung. But the drawings remain—abraded, retouched, sometimes (as in a study of the bony, intense face of Bishop John Fisher) vandalized by later hands, yet through it all, radiating an almost incredible freshness of scrutiny. What strikes one first about them is their self-evident truth. Nobody else got the knobbly, mild face of English patrician power so aptly, or saw so clearly the reserves of cunning and toughness veiled by the pink mask. The idea that Holbein was criticizing his subjects is, of course, absurd; and yet his rapport with them was so acute that he could render their unease at the unfamiliar sensation of being limned. Young Sir John Godsalve, one of whose offices was resonantly called the Common Meter of Precious Tissue, is watching Holbein as Holbein watches him: calm and yet withdrawn to the fine edge of nervousness. It is the look people used to direct at cameras a hundred years ago, before everyone got used to the lens... Robert Hughes, Time Magazine, June 20,1983

Art: Clear Eye, Flawless Touch, Full Article

Link Paintings and Drawings, Web Gallery of Art

Link Biography, Artchive

Interview with Lucian Freud

Art Critic Robert Hughes has called Lucian Freud the greatest living realist painter. In this 1988 five part video interview, Jake Auerbach talks to Lucian Freud.

Link Lucian Freud, Wikipedia

Link Lucian Freud Google Image Search Results

Matisse Cutouts - The National Gallery, Washington DC

Matisse

The National Gallery of Art has several paper cutouts by Henri Matisse. Click on the title line above to view a short WETA, PBS video on the subject. 

In 1977, the art critic for Time magazine, Robert Hughes, wrote about a major traveling exhibition of  his late work. The exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The article can be viewed at the link below.

The Sultan of Scissors