Word: bretons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants adoring a wayside crucifix was also, perhaps, an allegory of Gauguin's opinion of himself: Christ's face is his schematic self-portrait, and the Breton women may stand for Gauguin's followers in Pont-Aven...
...delicious strain of fantasy: a cat with a man's head serenading on the sill, a Janus head (Chagall himself, looking forward to modernism and back to the village?) displaying a heart on his hand. He was unquestionably a prince of tropes. "With Chagall alone," said Andre Breton, leader of the surrealists, "metaphor made its triumphant entry into modern painting." And though the procession that followed its entry had its tedious stretches, involving some fairly shameless plucking on the heartstrings, the best of Chagall remains indispensable to any nondoctrinaire reading of the art of the 20th century...
Because of his later reputation as a photojournalist and the co-founder of the Magnum photo agency, it is easy to forget Cartier-Bresson's debt to Andre Breton, surrealism's chief standard-bearer and truest believer. Breton and his circle of poets and artists wanted to revolutionize both consciousness and society through the purposeful absurdities of the unconscious. To dislodge conventional habits of mind, they practiced unpremeditated methods of creation, "unguided" sketching and automatic writing. Moved by their example, Cartier-Bresson realized that his Leica was the most automatic art instrument of all, one that could make split-second...
...narrative" of the galleries is split in half. On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are -- Daumier, Millet, the Barbizon painters, Fantin-Latour, the rural sentimentalists like Jules Breton, culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion). On the right are academic idealism and romanticism, Ingres and his heirs, Delacroix and his, smooth recipes of Grecian flesh...
That signal persevered from Halifax to Antigonish, around Cape Breton's Cabot Trail, even across the ferry to P.E.I...