Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Copley's sense of empirical realism would be carried forward by other painters. It wasn't so long ago that people thought of John James Audubon (1785-1851) as a gifted illustrator, an "ornithological artist"--but he was far more than that. He was a great formal painter with (almost literally, one might say) an eagle eye. To create his great work The Birds of America, four volumes showing 497 species, life-size and engraved in full color on the largest sheets of paper then available, he would shoot each bird and wire up its corpse on a board...
Around 1715 a German immigrant artist named Justus Kuhn painted one of the young sons of the Maryland oligarchy, Henry Darnall III: a 10-year-old baroque doll, gazed at by an adoring slave boy in a silver collar. The balustrade behind him and the formal gardens and pavilions behind that are complete fictions. No properties in America looked like this. Kuhn was meeting the illusory desire of Colonial gentry to seem like important extensions of European culture. It would be a recurrent fantasy. Fifty years later, in Boston, one sees John Singleton Copley doing much the same in some...
Other early American Modernists, like Arthur Dove, explored this landscape mysticism too. This is not surprising, since one of the great influences on Dove, Hartley and others was the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, whose tract Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published...
...painting does not go in tandem with those of architecture and engineering. Yet when painting aspires to a "scientific" analysis of things in sight, when the ego of the artist recedes behind the task of examination, one can at least speak of parallels. The American Realist generation of the turn of the century would not have disagreed. One of them was Thomas Anshutz (1851-1912), best known for his small factory scene, The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880. It's a piercing image of American youth and strength, feeling its new muscle (literally) in the post-Civil War industrial surge...
...century furniture--and one work by Benjamin West. When he was 12, West (1738-1820) announced that his talent would make him the "companion of kings and emperors." And as a matter of fact, it did: after he settled in England in 1763, he became George III's favorite artist. His definitive work was The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. It was a history painting but recent history, recounting a British victory over the French at the Battle of Quebec only a decade earlier. And it was in "modern," late-18th century dress. It changed the English sense of decorum...