Daniel Lang: Trees, Water, Silence: A Selection of Paintings from 1975 Through 1986

by Daniel Lang

The elements and values in these paintings are universal and can be recognized as such. However we must be cautious about taking too mechanistic an approach to Lang's formal world. Though we become aware after studying his paintings that these are highly structured, deliberately intellectual inventions, to over-emphasize this aspect risks losing the enchantment and the fantastic suggestiveness of the paintings. Their power to engage our feelings and imagination comes through their inherent poetry which is, after all, the essential reason for being. In the end whoever can apprehend in Daniel Lang's landscapes and still life the cognitive act. the incessant meditation, without disregarding their poetic force, can feel with the artist himself the dull sense of these subtly emotional painting.
- Rolando Bellini

Unknown Binding

About the author

Daniel Lang (1913–1981) was an award-winning journalist and author. He was a staff writer for the New Yorker for forty years, covering World War II in North Africa, Italy, and France. After the war he reported extensively on nuclear weapons and the morality of military science, and his articles were collected into several books, beginning with Early Tales of the Atomic Age. Casualties of War, the account of the brutal rape and murder of a South Vietnamese girl by US soldiers and the obstacles Private First Class Sven Eriksson faced in bringing his platoon mates to justice, won a Hillman Prize and was adapted into a Brian De Palma film of the same name. In addition to his journalistic work, Lang wrote poetry, children’s literature, and the libretto for an opera, Minutes to Midnight.