Connections/Perfection

My name is Barbara Weinberg. I'm curator of American paintings and sculpture, and my topic today is "Perfection."

What it really involves is works that have always seemed to me to be so unalterable, so completely flawless.

The artist has seized the essential, that you couldn't take anything away from them or

add anything to them without disrupting how excellent they are. And there's no formula.

Every work is different and every work marches to its own tune.

I just so much enjoy the rhythm in this work, the way I would enjoy the rhythm in a piece of music. It seems to be just the most perfect gathering of

very simple elements. Quadracircles, semicircles and full circles of red cloth

with emanating lines arranged in such a way that they almost seem like a dance of people using fans.

Winslow Homer executed this overnight and I think some of the energy of the moment, some of the magic of that moonlit night on the coast of Maine is embedded, actually in the way he handles the paint in this work.

Viscous squiggles around the foam as it rushes towards the shore. And the perfection for me also lies in the fact of Homer's leaving out things.

We just have a bit of the moon glow, and then the tiniest red dot of the lighthouse itself sort of enhances the monochrome of the canvas as a whole.

I see a perfect sculpture in the artist's concentration on the essential geometric elements that comprise this figure, and the restraint with which he, or she, articulates the essence of feminine fertility.

One of the common denominators for me of perfection is a kind of internal rhythmic structure. When I use the term "rhythm," I don't mean, necessarily, "energized." Sometimes rhythms are really grave and still.

Here, the gravity of the message is emphasized by the stillness and the control in the

concentric folds that articulate the drapery.

By contrast, Vincent van Gogh uses a tremendous amount of energy to create a vibrating environment to express the experience he had in Saint-Rémy, the asylum into which he checked himself. Everything in nature here comes to life: the trees, the clouds, the sky, the distant hills, even that slice of a waxing moon.

This amazing Necklace from about the turn of the century by René Lalique.

If you look carefully you'll see female forms. The arms splay out at the bottom and they encircle or embrace the forms of swans.

He's playing with all sorts of natural forms and then these wonderful stones that have a life of their own.

Something that often appeals to me in a work of art is humor. And one of the girls at the right

has her leg extended, her elbow crooked, and Degas has added at the left

a watering can that has its spout extended and its handle crooked.

Degas' very artful placement of that seems quite intentional as an artistic device and as a joke.

I love especially being reminded that not every work that gives you pleasure is necessarily major or important, but that many works that are relatively inconsequential can be deemed to be perfect. This little Hunting Dog seems to be the quintessence of restraint, and rhythm, and humor.

I've always thought of the artist as having the whole universe of choice at her or his disposal

and whether it's the matter of how large to work, what subject to depict

what colors to choose, what surface to choose, any of these are subject to

selection. From the whole universe or realm of choices she or he made

the choices that make that particular work very, very effective.