Word: cachin
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...this like staging Hamlet without the prince? As it turns out, no. Apart from the fact that some works of art should never travel, and deserve the tribute of a pilgrimage, their absence forces one to concentrate on the abundance of others that the curatorial team, headed by Francoise Cachin of the Musee d'Orsay, has assembled...
...National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris found they were all planning separate shows on different aspects of Gauguin -- his prints, his Brittany paintings and his Tahitian work -- it seemed obvious to merge the three. The result, thanks to its curators (Francoise Cachin and Claire Freches-Thory in France, Richard Brettell and Charles F. Stuckey in the U.S.), is both a curatorial masterpiece and the most complete view of its subject ever offered in a museum show...
Meanwhile, Orsay found its director at the Beaubourg: Francoise Cachin, a brilliant, Sorbonne-educated art historian whose specialty is Manet. The first issue she had to settle was the scope of the museum. What did 19th century mean? There was no way the Louvre was going to surrender its masterpieces of early 19th century classicism and romanticism. So Orsay's program must begin after the peak of the romantic movement. Cachin, Laclotte and the new museum's staff wanted to start in 1863 -- the emblematic year that saw the first Salon des Refuses, Manet's epochal Le Dejeuner...
...which is sure to love it -- is the amount of space given to so-called pompier art of the Third Empire. (Pompier means "fireman," and the allusion is to the heroic nudes with Greek helmets, resembling the casques of the Paris fire brigade, that infested beaux arts academic painting.) Cachin and her colleagues have dredged up an astounding panoply of period kitsch, from 1850s imitators of Ingres through Bouguereau to what must be the most obsessively pederastic elocution in all art history, Jean Delville's School of Plato, featuring Alcibiades and his willowy friends yearning like blessed damsels...
...caused so many gallons of ink to be spilled on it since, is its insolubility as narrative. An "uncouth riddle," one critic called it. What are those people doing? One modernist answer is that they are busy being in a painting. But, as Curator Cachin shows in her catalogue note's meticulous and witty unskeining of Déjeuner, there is far more to it than that...