George M. Tapley, Jr., Arts Magazine, February 1983 Thomas Cornell’s (ambitions) are mythic… Like the greatest interpreter of this subject, Poussin, Cornell adumbrates a personal vision, updating the actors and the setting, and going for the spirit (not the...
Paul Smith, Arts Magazine, February 1982 Thomas Cornell’s paintings and prints always presented a message… In the early ‘60’s, he portrayed French revolutionary figures clearly out of sympathy with the revolution. He went on to print illustrated broadsides about civil...
Peter Fuller, Art Monthly, March 1980 I discover that at the level of ideas we have much in common. He (Cornell) is a Feuerbachian, ‘humanist’ socialist, who clearly believes in the significance of a utopian, affective vision of aesthetic practice… The problematic he...
Alan Wallach, Arts Magazine, February 1980 Cornell aspires to a type of history painting rooted in classical tradition and yet applicable to contemporary life. Such an ambition defies recent art history. Hence the problem Cornell faces: to breathe life into tradition...
Ruth Weisberg, Artweek, December 8, 1979 What works best for Cornell, I think, is the paradox of his refined, natural, classic (never neoclassic) style coupled with primal, sometimes orgiastic subject matter… This exhibit is a wonderful opportunity to view work by a...
