Word: artes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unassailable, though uneven, greatness! Courbet has become one of the titans of radical nostalgia. There cannot be a political artist alive who does not dream of having Courbet's sweeping breadth of access to the public. "Courbet Reconsidered," the show of 97 paintings and drawings, organized by the art historians Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, currently at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City (and scheduled to open at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in February), is not, and could not have been, a "complete" show. But it is the first attempt by an American museum to show Courbet whole...
What one sees today, especially in Brooklyn, is a different Courbet. He is a painter immersed both in popular art and in the traditions of his medium (Caravaggio, the Le Nains, Corot). He is inventive, yes, but not in a burn- the-Louvre way. He is an empiricist (though not without sentimental moments) for whom the sense of touch preceded that of sight. What the vibration of light would be to Monet, the force of gravity was to Courbet. It is the physical law that insinuates itself into almost every one of his images, confirming their materiality and stressing their...
This predisposition made him a great painter of the nude, though undoubtedly a phallocratic one. One sees him at full stretch in Sleep, the painting of two life-size lesbians entwined on a bed. It proves the impossibility of distinguishing, at a certain level, between pornography and art. The painting has little to do with lesbian perceptions of sex: it is a seraglio scene, an enactment for men's eyes only. But despite the corniness of the flowers and pearls that allegorize Luxury, the creamy rose of those bodies, shadowed with olive and held within the complicated machinery...
Time and again, in this show, one sees proleptic hints of art to come. The limestone crags and ledges of the valleys around his native Flagey, capped with dense dark green and anchored by thick clefts of shadow, have a solidity that young Cezanne would emulate, along with the pasty, almost mortared paint that evokes their surfaces. His rolling waves, marbled with foam as solidly as a steak with fat, reappear on the other side of the Atlantic in Winslow Homer's seapieces at Prout's Neck in Maine. Picasso would do versions of the sleeping girls on the banks...
...Maybe it is every bit as unfair to the FBI, which pursued the case vigorously and effectively, as it is to Freedom Riders. But whose truth is it anyway? Every film -- or every biography or news report or memory -- is distorted, if only by one's perceptions. To create art is to pour fact into form; and sometimes the form shapes the facts. William Randolph Hearst never said "Rosebud," and Evita Peron didn't sing pop, and Richard III was probably a swell guy, no matter how Shakespeare libeled him. This is what artists do: shape ideas and grudges...