Word: artistically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the untidy, artist-infested neighborhood of Montparnasse stepped an unlikely savior: Eugène Atget. A failed actor and painter then pushing 40, he had picked up a camera a few years earlier and started a meager trade providing stock photographs to artists. Over the next 30 years, Atget systematically captured what he called "the old Paris" in some 10,000 photos of remarkable intelligence and poignancy. In the process, he helped transform photography into a serious art form, becoming one of its founding giants...
...France's Bibliothèque Nationale, home to more than 5,000 of Atget's albumen prints and glass negatives, is mounting the first major look at the artist's work in at least a quarter century - and the first ever in France. "Atget, a Retrospective," until July 1 at the library's Richelieu center in Paris, marks the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth and the 80th of his death. The show offers 350 scenes of a vanished era: quiet courtyards, bustling squares, manicured parks, crumbling cornices and balustrades, placid river barges and enticing shop fronts, as well...
Atget developed that understanding by prowling the streets in search of architectural details to photograph for his artist clients. His 1897 decision to document an endangered Paris coincided with the city's formation of a preservation commission to help rescue its disappearing landscape. Without official sanction Atget pitched in, setting off at dawn and working his way outward in concentric circles from the city center. He assembled his prints in albums, which he sold to local museums, galleries and the Bibliothèque Nationale. "Carrying his heavy and outmoded equipment on his back, casually and poorly dressed, he became himself...
...sugar. He and his wife, Valentine, a former actress, hung out with some of Paris' leading dramatists - though he left behind not a single portrait of friends or associates. One photo in the show gives a tiny insight into the photographer's world: Small Interior of a Dramatic Artist, which is actually Atget's own tidy, book-lined apartment...
...haunted--more impregnable--than you remembered. That's the lesson of the mesmerizing Hopper show that has opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where it remains until Aug. 19 before traveling to Washington and Chicago. That's also the Hopper paradox. He's the easy-to-read artist who's always just beyond our grasp...