I saw this at the temporary exhibition of mid-century British painting at the Getty last week. I am pretty fine with looking at art on the screen in general, but this is one where the physical painting for some reason carries much more force than the image. Go see it if you’re in Los Angeles.
It’s true that many paintings are much more impressive in person than in print or on a screen. Sometimes it has to do with the size of the painting, and other times with the fact that all the color and “optical depth” can not be reproduced accurately in print or on a screen. It doesn’t help that the screens that most people use are not well calibrated (even if the manufacturer claims that they are).
The exhibit at the Chazen Museum of photographs by Markus Brunetti of old cathedral facades in Europe is a recent local example. Samples of the photos online do not look particularly impressive, but in person they are eye popping. Most of them are ten feet high and contain immense amount of detail because they were constructed in software as a composite of many much smaller images (obviously with perspective corrections). In person the images look almost three dimensional, with, for example, the lattice work in rosettes over doorways seemingly hovering over the stone behind. A couple of times I looked at an extremely acute angle to satisfy myself that in fact they actually were 2D, and I found it a little disorienting. Again, you just won’t get that from a book or a screen.
Gail, my reference to John Gabriel Borkman was a sly allusion, as I’m sure those sly Canadians at Stratford intended it. They’re real good at picking up on the latest Zeitgeist.
Quomodocumque 
I saw this at the temporary exhibition of mid-century British painting at the Getty last week. I am pretty fine with looking at art on the screen in general, but this is one where the physical painting for some reason carries much more force than the image. Go see it if you’re in Los Angeles.
It somehow reminds me of a play I saw this summer, Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman.
It’s true that many paintings are much more impressive in person than in print or on a screen. Sometimes it has to do with the size of the painting, and other times with the fact that all the color and “optical depth” can not be reproduced accurately in print or on a screen. It doesn’t help that the screens that most people use are not well calibrated (even if the manufacturer claims that they are).
The exhibit at the Chazen Museum of photographs by Markus Brunetti of old cathedral facades in Europe is a recent local example. Samples of the photos online do not look particularly impressive, but in person they are eye popping. Most of them are ten feet high and contain immense amount of detail because they were constructed in software as a composite of many much smaller images (obviously with perspective corrections). In person the images look almost three dimensional, with, for example, the lattice work in rosettes over doorways seemingly hovering over the stone behind. A couple of times I looked at an extremely acute angle to satisfy myself that in fact they actually were 2D, and I found it a little disorienting. Again, you just won’t get that from a book or a screen.
Completely agree about the current exhibit at the Chazen. Go see it, everybody!
Really? Nothing on Trump?
Gail, my reference to John Gabriel Borkman was a sly allusion, as I’m sure those sly Canadians at Stratford intended it. They’re real good at picking up on the latest Zeitgeist.