Albert York

(About art rather than language.)

From the 6/3 New Yorker, p. 10, under Galleries–Uptown:

Albert York

The painter, who died in 2004 [actually 2009], at the age of eighty, may be the most esteemed artist you’ve never heard of. (The sculptor Robert Grosvenor owns a couple of York’s diminutive pictures and has been known to travel with them.) Each still-life and landscape exudes an exquisite weirdness. A skeleton relaxes on a lawn with a nude woman; an alligator creeps into a field. The paintings here were made in the sixties and seventies, but you might think they were a hundred years older. As York once told Calvin Tompkins, who profiled him for this magazine in 1995, “The modern world just passes me by. I don’t notice it. I missed the train.” Through June 14. (Davis & Langdale, 231 E. 60th St. …)

There’s a minimal Wikipedia article:

Albert York (1928–2009) was an American painter.

York painted the beauty he saw in the world, once telling an interviewer, “I think we live in a Paradise. . . . This is a Garden of Eden.”

Michael Brenson of the New York Times described him as a “reclusive painter of deliberate, dreamlike landscapes, still lifes and portraits.”

Three samples of York’s fascinating work:

  (#1)

A photo of York, with a still life.

  (#2)

Tulips shooting up straight out of the ground, horse and rider in the background.

  (#3)

The skeleton and nude mentioned in the New Yorker.

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