Word: alma-tadema
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...money; it always has. Peter Wilson, the genial and astute entrepreneur whose direction of the auction house of Sotheby's has done so much to create the modern investment fetishism, likes to point out that the prices paid in their day for the works of Victorian painters like Alma-Tadema (when multiplied by 30 to bring them into line with the devalued dollar of the '70s) would make the cost of a Pollock or a Jasper Johns today seem almost reasonable. It is said that the Marquess of Westminster, when asked to send a painting from his collection...
Some respectful and some grinning, the visitors crowded around two paintings, Millet's Sower (lent by the Provident Trust Co.) and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Reading from Homer. A few of the oldest and boldest confessed that Millet and Alma-Tadema still looked great to them...
Could modern art ever mean so much to so many as Millet or Alma-Tadema had? Museum Director Fiske Kimball was not taking any bets. But in a thoughtful foreword to the show he pointed out that the art of the snob of today is often that of the minority of tomorrow and the majority of the day after tomorrow: "The public, which doesn't know much about art but 'knows what it likes,' actually likes what it knows...
...academic painters and museum directors has long been his special target. In 1928 he published his best known book Ananias, or the False Artist, in which he performed the not too difficult feat of denting the reputations of such painters as Edwin Howland Blashfield, Ignacio Zuloaga, Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema. Emanuel Leutze, the creator of Waslington Crossing the Delaware, and the society portraits of John Singer Sargent (like most critics Walter Pach has respect for the Sargent water colors). He tore into the critics who had praised them, the museums, particularly the Metropoli- tan Museum of Art, that bought them...
...Modern artists flayed as Ananiases: John W. Alexander, Alma-Tadema, Bakst, Blashfield, Bonnat, Allan Clark, Kenyon Cox, Daniel Chester French, Gerome, Laszlo, Manship, Mestrovic, Sargent, Lorado Taft, Zuloaga...