Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There was a demonic as well as an Arcadian side to European images of the Americas. In the mid-16th century another Portuguese artist, doubtless inspired by reports of Caribbean cannibalism, painted an Inferno whose Satan wears a feather crown. But in general it was the noble Indian who would predominate. He became decorative in the late 17th century and positively rococo in the 18th, peering from cartouches, dallying under formalized palms. The ideas of Rousseau transmuted him into a red-skinned Cato or Brutus garbed in instinctive rectitude. And as he began to perish along the white frontier...
Vatican frescoes), eaten corn or pota toes or runner beans, grown a sunflower or tasted a cultivated strawberry. The imagined landscapes were either writhing with fearsome organic life or else stupendous and desolate. When Frans Post, a traveling 17th century artist, painted a view of the Sao Francisco River in Bra zil, a lone capybara by a cactus tree took on the ruminative air of a Caspar Da vid Friedrich monk, contemplating the infinite. "What a fabulous and extravagant country we're in!" exclaimed the great naturalist Von Humbolt...
...EXHIBIT raises obscure questions of quality, it also brings up, and illustrates, problems of a more universal nature. The major question is whether this can be considered a work of art, an original work of art, this thing probably never touched by the artist whose name it bears. The market for sculpture in the 19th century was huge. The rising bourgeoisie wanted art and culture in their homes and their lives, and the major patrons of sculpture shifted from governments to businessmen. The demand was there, the technology was available to reproduce these pieces in large numbers and the artists...
...statues made by foundry-workers are called art, then the role of the artist becomes unclear. Until the Renaissance, artists were craftsmen, then they became humanists, today they are celebrities. Janet Cox, the editor of the show's excellent but outrageously expensive catalogue, likes to draw a parallel between this collection and the pieces by the late sculptor David Smith which critic Clement Greenberg recently took it upon himself to repaint. Each of the statues in this show was similarly refinished when it came from its mold--the caster added details, smoothed the finish, destroyed the mystique of the artist...
Metamorphoses in 19th-Century Sculpture suggests several issues: the value of mass-produced art, the necessity of uniqueness to artistic success, the mystique of the individual artist; but the notes on the display cases neither raise nor explore them. These problems intrigue the interested observer without a connoisseur's eye, and the show frustrates him by avoiding them...