Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that, and a painter of 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...
CAPOTE: A BIOGRAPHY by Gerald Clarke. A judicious, sympathetic portrait of an artist who wrote well, knew everyone and courted scandal, almost always successfully. Clarke is a TIME contributor...
...since 1904 has there been a proper survey of Sienese Renaissance painting outside Siena. Not even the enthusiasms of Bernard Berenson and his heir Pope-Hennessy could give a Sienese artist like Sassetta the popularity of a Florentine like Botticelli. Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence...
...fierce empiricism of Masaccio, determined to fill real space with real figures that the senses could know, made its mark on some painters but not others. Perspective in 15th century Siena was something an artist could use as a scaffolding, modify or abandon altogether; Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni, active from 1423 to 1450) did this all the time. He studied earlier Sienese artists, mainly Pietro Lorenzetti, for spatial clues as carefully as Masaccio looked at Giotto, and inevitably, came up with a lighter, slightly flatter and, as it were, more spindly and papery space -- which he still imbued with...
...memorable: confident, unhurried, interested and amused. Late in the novel, on the brink of the opera's opening night, the narrative pauses briefly to consider Oliver Twentyman, a trouper in his 80s who will sing the role of Merlin the magician: "He liked being old -- and still a great artist. Age, linked with achievement, was a splendid crown to life." So it is, as this novel and Davies' remarkable career munificently demonstrate...