Word: caravaggio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Daniel Boone of the art world. While the hardy backwoods pioneer opened new lands to satisfy his hunger for "elbow room," Stella has spent his 20-year painting career trying to create "working space," his term for the expansive three-dimensional illusions painted by the post-Renaissance master Caravaggio...
Admittedly, the connection between Caravaggio's action-packed religious paintings and the geometric day-glo of Stella's enormous abstract works is pretty hard to see at first glance. But there is a connection, and you don't have to take my word for it. Stella himself has devoted 167 richly illustrated pages to drawing...
...Provence; and 15 months after that, discharged but still plagued by unassuageable fits of melancholy, he shot himself to death in the rural village of Auvers, just north of Paris. Van Gogh was 37 when he died -- at the same age, it has often been noted, as Raphael, Caravaggio and Watteau, and with an oeuvre no less brilliant than theirs...
...Caravaggio's quest for strength and legibility reversed itself. He exaggerated the battle between light and dark to such a pitch that the late work became hard to read; its forms turned anxious and flickering, as though snatched from the very throat of darkness. But by then, this confusion had acquired its own expressive integrity as the handwriting of a painter more and more possessed by death. Caravaggio's sense of mortality was the thing his imitators found hardest to copy. But this did not stop the spread of Caravaggism. Within a decade of his death his followers had diffused...
Scratch almost any great 17th century painter except Poussin, and traces of Caravaggio will appear. The vivid, tragic piety of his work after 1600 was fundamental to baroque painting. Without his sense of humble, ordinary bodies lapped in darkness but transfigured by sacramental light, what would Rembrandt have done? Caravaggio was one of the hinges of art history: there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same. No wonder that he is now the artist that many new painters, in an age without authentic culture heroes, pine...