Had the rare pleasure yesterday of being shown through the work of an important artist by the artist's daughter. It was John Brack again, whose third daughter (center in the picture below) is a friend of my friend V, and now everything looks different. (My images, snapped from the catalog, are a bit skewed.) Of
those I posted Wednesday, I learned that "The Bar" is about the need to
move beyond the unarticulated trauma soldiers brought back from WW2, which festered in the workers' suburbs (whose skyline is evoked by the hats of the drinkers), the flowers but also the yellow window at upper right suggesting hope. "Nude with Two Chairs" is also a Holocaust picture, showing a woman to whom something terrible has happened - evoked both by the coat and by the dried blood-like whorls on the carpet - who is nevertheless poised to move on.
The various pictures of cutting machines, knives and scissors problematize knowledge, which can heal but also harm. And even the late paintings came to make a sort of sense, like "The Hands and the Faces" (1986), whose jumbled bouquet of postcards of faces from world art (a Wanjina face in the middle) poised above a forest of wooden hands on a glass table uneasily supported by bowling pins above the rich complete patterns of a carpet came to seem full of a pathos inversely proportional to the perfection of his realism. Of course, no interpretation of a painting can be final, something brought home as F explained her interpretation of the shapes in a painting she's had on her living room wall for years (on loan to the exhibition), "Still Life with Veterinary Instruments" (1963), below: the two pink things on the bottom shelf are like children threatened by the trio of blades above--
"You know what those are, don't you," interjected a sporty-looking older woman standing nearby, who it emerged grew up on a farm. Neither F nor V nor I did. "They're for castrating sheep." And the pink things - chalk for marking the foreheads of the sheep you'd castrated. Oh.
Had the rare pleasure yesterday of being shown through the work of an important artist by the artist's daughter. It was John Brack again, whose third daughter (center in the picture below) is a friend of my friend V, and now everything looks different. (My images, snapped from the catalog, are a bit skewed.) Of those I posted Wednesday, I learned that "The Bar" is about the need to 
move beyond the unarticulated trauma soldiers brought back from WW2, which festered in the workers' suburbs (whose skyline is evoked by the hats of the drinkers), the flowers but also the yellow window at upper right suggesting hope. "Nude with Two Chairs" is also a Holocaust picture, showing a woman to whom something terrible has happened - evoked both by the coat and by the dried blood-like whorls on the carpet - who is nevertheless poised to move on. 
The various pictures of cutting machines, knives and scissors problematize knowledge, which can heal but also harm. And even the late paintings came to make a sort of sense, like "The Hands and the Faces" (1986), whose jumbled bouquet of postcards of faces from world art (a Wanjina face in the middle) poised above a forest of wooden hands on a glass table uneasily supported by bowling pins above the rich complete patterns of a carpet came to seem full of a pathos inversely proportional to the perfection of his realism. Of course, no interpretation of a painting can be final, something brought home as F explained her interpretation of the shapes in a painting she's had on her living room wall for years (on loan to the exhibition), "Still Life with Veterinary Instruments" (1963), below: the two pink things on the bottom shelf are like children threatened by the trio of blades above--
"You know what those are, don't you," interjected a sporty-looking older woman standing nearby, who it emerged grew up on a farm. Neither F nor V nor I did. "They're for castrating sheep." And the pink things - chalk for marking the foreheads of the sheep you'd castrated. Oh.
