Word: antigna
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...market. Brandish ing their wormy palettes, these venerable shades mock the belief in linear progress that was once a byword of modernism. If anyone in 1960 had dared suggest that dozens of moldering eminences from the salons and academies of preimpressionist France, forgotten men like Jean-Pierre Alexandre Antigna, Frangois Bonvin, Joseph Bail or Alphonse Legros, would some day be in the museums again and become the subject of excited scholarly debate, he would have been thought not merely perverse but plain...
Sometimes the impact of the canvases is blunted by time or convention, as are some of the passages in Dickens that made our great-grandparents weep. A painting like Antigna's The Fire, 1850, looks stilted to us now, with its Raphaelesque pyramidal composition, its marmoreal smoothness, its "classicizing" of disaster. Yet to endow the sight of a wretched working family about to be burned for a landlord's greed with the scale and treatment of official history painting (it is about nine feet square) was in itself a political statement and, to its audience 130 years...
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