My father once asked his mother, the artist Annette Nancarrow, what she thought of Leon Trotsky. “His attire was impeccable, and I was particularly struck by the Parisian calf-skin gloves he took off of his beautifully manicured hands.”The answer was vintage Annette. As a painter, she saw the part of the surface that revealed the inner man — the bourgeois fop within the fiery revolutionary. I’ve been thinking a great deal about my grandmother ever since I saw the “Vida Americana” exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York. Pollock called Orozco’s “Prometheus” mural at Pomona College “the greatest painting done in modern times.” Benton went further, describing the work of the Mexican masters as “the only great art of our time.”

Source: International New York Times March 21, 2020 18:22 UTC