The Art Institute of Chicago

(8 January 2012)

A painter can be intense bordering on madness, without seeming grotesque, by being true not to the images of the physical world, but to the images of dreams and nightmares. In contrast to a flickering display, visual memories retain what is essential about an object, without corrupting arbitrarily. Visual memories are the images of emotions. What is remembered is a mood, a reflex, not the stimulant.

A painter specialises by developing the vocabulary of the physical world (Edward Hopper in "Nighthawks"), of memories and dreams (Gerhard Richter in "Christa and Wolfi", "Mrs Wolleh with Children," and "Woman Descending the Staircase"), or of an invented world (Vincent van Gogh in "Bedroom in Arles").