Word: arlesian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...youth and swaddled in mink. But there were young beauties too, including Lucy Ferry, wife of Rock Star Bryan Ferry, who was swanning around in her Louise Brooks bob, sporting a brown broad-brimmed straw hat topped by, yes, a huge pink branch. Another woman tried on an exquisite Arlesian fichu. She had it on backward, but it was still charming. Acting out their dress-up fantasies, or simply getting to the changing cabins, they all seemed to trip over a dark fellow lying on the rug intently watching a video. He laughed now and then and clapped his hands...
...that had been circulating among avant-garde painters in Paris. In a way it did: the ground was covered with snow, like the top of Fuji. But soon it (and he) melted, and in his letters no less than in his paintings one sees the colors that sign his Arlesian period, the yellow, ultramarine and mauve. In the late spring, "the landscape gets tones of gold of various tints, green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold, and in the same way bronze, copper, in short starting from citron yellow all the way to a dull, dark yellow color like a heap...
...forms of the Arlesian landscape, its patchwork of fields and tree-lined roads, were already embedded in his Dutch background-"it reminds one of Holland: everything is flat, only one thinks rather of the Holland of Ruisdael or Hobbema than of Holland as it is"-but the color was like nothing in Van Gogh's previous life. Seeing his desire for "radical" color confirmed in the actual landscape gave him confidence. It affected even those paintings in which no landscape occurs, like the self-portrait of Vincent with a shaved head, gazing not at but past the viewer with...
...Gogh's Arlesian work offers one of the most moving narratives of development in Western art: a painter-and, needless to repeat, a very great one-inventing a landscape as it invents him. The inevitable result is that one cannot visit Aries without seeing Van Goghs everywhere. The fishing boats on the dark beach of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer have gone, and the fishermen's troglodytic cottages are now replaced by anthill apartment buildings. But to see an Arlesian orchard foaming into April bloom is to glimpse Van Gogh rendering them ("Absolutely clear ... A frenzy of impastos...
...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 like Jules Bastien-Lepage, with his soulful peasant girls in burlap, what can it mean? To what imaginable modernist context do the many style rétro canvases in this show belong?...
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