![]() Perhaps it seems a short step if you can dethrone a great comedian to taking on the greatest painter of the 20th century. Hannah Gadsby – with her jokes from which laughter has been drained – was one of the people responsible for getting the Melbourne Comedy Festival to stop calling its award The Barry in honour of Barry Humphries. But Berger was a critic who believed art was ultimately a moral thing, the position taken by that great novelist Henry James and the extraordinarily influential 20th century Cambridge literary critic, F.R. Well, the #MeToo world takes a significantly dimmer view of this than John Berger did in his very grand examination of the better and lesser Picasso, the painter who created and illuminated truth and the one who dramatised to spectacular effect his capacity to pleasure himself. Speaking of Picasso it’s interesting to see that Hannah Gadsby who uses a comedian’s technique to parade effects of unmitigated seriousness has co-curated a show called Pablomatic at the Brooklyn Museum which according to reports highlights the great painter’s dynamic and sometimes daemonic devotion to surging his way to a sometimes devastatingly erotic art as if painting had no greater purpose than to celebrate rampant sexuality of the most masculine kind. He is opposite to another very great painter Caravaggio where the stab of eroticism and its histrionic delineation is what creates the fire of the maker of great art even though the paintings transcend the thing they flaunt. Wasn’t it John Berger in The Success and Failure of Picasso who used the example of his wife as a depiction of love which had no element of histrionic voyeurism. The greatest of the paintings have an astonishing authority which is in no way showy. And, of course, Rembrandt’s effortless sense of drama always tends to be quiet. And if you leaf through Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes you will be arrested by the drawings and etchings which tingle with the felt life of an artist whose capacity for dramatic realisation touches everything he ever sketched. Rembrandt was one of the greatest artists (in any medium) the world has seen. It would be wrong to belittle the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria because the emphasis is on etchings and drawings with a few paintings to highlight the majesty of the work.
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