Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Someone once said that avant-garde movements inevitable lose their momentum, citing Impressionism and the hippie movement as classic examples of his theory. Yet the art of Malet is fortunate: Created in an age so befuddled by every kind of "-ism" from Fauvism to Cubism to Dadaism, and with new fashions developing in geometric progression, it is graced by a label which, while evoking instant recognition (everyone's aunt gushes over "the lovely Impressionist paintings"), does not really set any limits on an artist's self-expression. Impressions pure and simple. Few painters escape the biggest pitfall along this path...
...paintings and the scarcity of a certain artist's work because it is difficult to sound knowledgeable about the sensations impressionism evokes. It is perhaps the most ambiguously worded of artistic messages precisely because it imparts no message. There is a foreshadowing of the primitivism of later 20th century art in it and much of its restlessness, and so one is relieved to fall back on exchanges of anecdotes instead of theories of aesthetics...
Rolly-Michaux's Sunday afternoon preview, however, did not just afford a glimpse of viewers as preoccupied with each other's reactions to art as with the art itself. The paintings on exhibit include 10 works rarely seen in this country by the Post-Impressionist Georges Binet (1865-1949) and a rich collection of recent works by the 65-year-old Rouen artist, Albert Malet, who has been called "the last of the Impressionists." The paintings are very different in spirit but alike in quality; this is a small exhibition, but you will want to linger long...
Georges Binet was one of those fortunate individuals not compelled to starve as an artist. He was well-to-do and had almost immediate artistic success at the Paris Salons, receiving gold medals for his work, becoming an Officer of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, and finally made Knight of the Legion d'Honneur in 1937. The prosperity and security show through every canvass--his is a decidedly comfortable art. There is no question of his technical skill or the "prettiness' of his paintings, large or small (he generally preferred to paint them about 10' by 15"). Indeed, they...
...redirection of his own work, this continuity is rather a surprise. It is almost as if Binet, having once perfected his craft, spent the rest of his life hermetically sealed away from the explorations of his contemporaries. It seems ironic that Impressionism--itself a traditions of mid-19th century art--should be the vehicle for this man's repeating for fifty years the same kind of radical challenge to the etiquette-formal image. After all, wouldn't an old man view the scene about him somewhat differently than a young one? This may be explained by the pure accident that...