英语文摘:Bold or boring? - impression of Bob Dylan's new exhibition

COPENHAGEN, Sept. 10 (Xinhua) -- Famous for his ground-breaking music over the past half-century, America-born Bob Dylan is on show again, this time with his latest exhibition of paintings here. But critics say his reputation masks his limited skill as a painter.

"The Brazil Series," as the collection is known, consists of 40 acrylic paintings and eight pencil drawings, and opened last weekend at the National Gallery of Denmark.

The paintings, with such titles as "The Incident," "Favela Villa Candido," and "Barber Shop," display Dylan's fascination with Brazil's cultural diversity.

They picture crowded slums, spaghetti-eaters in a cafe and workers in a vineyard. Dylan also captures sombre snapshots of courtrooms, street shootings, cabaret dancers, even a solitary boxer practising in a gym. The series was painted between 2009 and March 2010.

"Dylan is a story teller," says Torben Weirup, art critic for Berlingske Tidende, a conservative Danish broadsheet. "A wonderful storyteller in his songs, he is also a storyteller in his paintings."

But Dylan does not tell the story of Brazil's multiple roles as an emerging economy and industrial powerhouse, nor of its reputation as a football giant and samba sensation.

Dylan often made rough sketches in Brazil, and recreated the scenes in his studio. The canvases, vibrant with color and drawn with short brushstrokes, evoke German expressionism, the American Ashcan School and traces of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

"As in his music, Bob Dylan bluntly borrows elements," explains Kasper Monrad, the National Gallery's Chief Curator, "and he does it with admiration and no shame at all."