Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...work. To mark the 200th anniversary of his death, at the age of 80 in 1779, a huge Chardin show opened in January at the Grand Palais in his native Paris, with 142 paintings, drawings and pastels, and a catalogue by one of Europe's most distinguished art historians, Pierre Rosenberg. Two American institutions took part in the production, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; this month the Chardin exhibition-shorn, alas, to 90 works-opened in Cleveland, before moving to Boston in the fall. It is a real event: the kind...
...Chardin's art, in the twilight of a period stuffed with every kind of jerky innovation, narcissistic blurting and trashy "relevance," is to be reminded that lucidity, deliberation, unaffectedness, probity and calm are still the chief virtues of the art of painting. Chardin has long been a painter's painter, studied-and, when his work was cheap, collected-by other artists. He deeply affected at least three of the founders of modernism, Cėzanne, Matisse and Braque, and Van Gogh compared him to Rembrandt. What seized them in his work was not the humility of its subject...
Chardin's prolonged meditation on brown crockery and the spiky fur of dead hares took place in the midst of an efflorescence of luxury art-pink bodies, swirling fronds of gold ornament, rinsed allegorical skies: the rococo style. It pervaded his milieu, and he did not despise it; but it was alien to his temperament...
This fixation on truth and nature endeared him to advanced thinkers in France, especially to Denis Diderot, compiler of the monumental Encyclopedia. "It is the chief business of art," Diderot declared in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by getting close to nature." Chardin, Diderot said, epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back, great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such...
There are almost no precedents in earlier art for Chardin's extraordinary blend of intimacy and decorum; and to find anything like it in later painting, one must go forward a century to impressionism, without often finding its equal there...