Word: 1880s
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Historical Commission officials called the house at 1746 a "very robust and inventive" example of the architecture of James Fogarty, a local designer in vogue during the late 1880s...
...Meade describes Blavatsky, she was a gallant figure, cheerfully aware of skidding toward disaster, always ready with a bizarre scheme to rescue herself and her bemused followers. Toward the end, in the 1880s, matters seemed hope less. She was living in exile in Germany, fat, sick, impoverished, deserted by the faithful and under attack for fakery by the Society for Psychical Research. The reader feels like cheering when she turns up a few months later in London, outrageous as ever, leaking cosmological eye wash with every wheeze, as the head of a large and adoring band of occultists...
...organizers of this Royal Academy show, a team of scholars working under Art Historian Alan Bowness, have treated the period in an even vaguer way than Fry. There were retrograde as well as advanced currents in 1880s art, and many artists recoiled from impressionism, or were indifferent to it, instead of trying like Gauguin or Van Gogh to push beyond it. They are represented too, to the confusion of the term: if post-impressionism means not only Van Gogh's Arlesian canvases, in all their lambent color and twisting, linear energies, but also the eclectic products of a tonal impressionist...
...other hand, so wide a cast has its advantages. All art has a context in other art, and the advanced painting of the 1880s was no exception. Thus, to take only one example, one's understanding of the motives of the Pont-Aven painters, Paul Gauguin and the artists who gathered around him in Brittany?Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and others?can only be enriched by seeing how their more traditional contemporaries dealt with the same subjects of Breton life. Brittany pervaded the salons of the 1880s. Its landscape of tight villages, stony shorelines, near primitive Christian...
What was the anti-impressionist reaction of the 1880s all about? Partly, subject matter, the issue of what painting could express. Impressionism had been the art of the bourgeois paradise, naturalism unmodulated by idea. It had no content beyond the "view" ("Monet is only an eye," Cezanne said, "but good God, what an eye!"), no governing system of imagery, no symbols. To younger artists, it therefore seemed lax and unambitious. They wanted to return painting to a more demanding kind of diction ?exemplary and grand, like the art of the museums. All manner of stylistic sources fed into their...