Philip Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram, May 11, 1986 Cornell, after two years of work, has just completed and installed a 22-foot series of paintings entitled “The Four Seasons.” …In this age, the panels are an exceptional achievement in figurative art. Sensual,...
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...
