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Article: The Exacting Tensions of Leland Bell; A Striking Retrospective at the Phillips
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- January 24, 1987
- Author:
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Leland Bell is a painter's painter, in the sense that other
painters think and talk about his work, and also in the sense that
his work remains widely unknown. Although he has shown regularly at
commercial galleries in New York since the late 1950s, the
retrospective exhibition opening today at the Phillips Collection is
his first solo exposure in a major museum.
Such inattention is hard to understand, in a way, when standing
in front of one of Bell's substantial, serious paintings, each of
which is far more impressive in actuality than in photographic
reproduction. Bell paints traditional subjects-still lifes,
portraits, landscapes, the human figure clothed and unclothed-in
relatively ...