Word: chardin
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...American artists to whom he is closest are Edward Hopper and his fellow Californian, the late great Richard Diebenkorn; among Europeans, the names Giorgio Morandi, Chardin and Manet are among the first to pop up. But he is also one of those painters who, happily, feel entitled to pick and quote wherever they choose: he does not suffer from the snobbery of influence. "The sublime of Orange Crate art," critic Adam Gopnik writes in his catalog introduction, and one knows just what he means. Thiebaud is one of the few American artists whose ambitions have no Puritan or didactic dimension...
Some people have obstinately wrong ideas about what is multiple and what is unique. A fish or a fruit by an 18th century master like Chardin is thought to be distinct, its presence in the still life making it the only one of its kind. But Nature is a greater mass producer than Culture. The sea is full of sea robins and whiting, all looking the same. The peach tree is laden with identical peaches. So it is with Thiebaud's cakes and pies. He is fascinated by variation within repetition, but he never thinks of repetition as being antipoetic...
...Spain (no picnic for a traveler then) in 1865. Clearly he was much taken by the Spanish still-life painter Sanchez Cotan, and by the tradition of the vanitas--images of objects gathered together to symbolize the transience of pleasure and earthly life. And then, particularly, there was Chardin, the 18th century French master of still life, whose benign and composed presence is palpable in Manets like the Bunch of Asparagus, 1880, with its almost miraculous rendering of the blue tips of the asparagus spears. (It sold, fresh off the easel, to a collector named Charles Ephrussi. Manet felt...
...glimpse of a truncated painting along the top edge and a black-and-white form that, after some peering, resolves itself as part of the head of a cat. Perhaps it is there because Manet loved cats. Or perhaps it is a quotation of the intently gazing cat in Chardin's big picture of dead seafood, The Ray. Or perhaps both...
...repeats some element of her appearance. White feathers repeat the white of her apron; a blue feather picks up the blue of her ribbon; a pink feather, the color of her cheek. It is as perfectly made as any sonnet. It makes you realize what rewards can flow from Chardin's desire to link the appearance of spontaneous feeling with the discreet display of its opposite, a technical perfection whose integrity rises from knowing its own limits. "All through his life," writes curator Pierre Rosenberg in the catalog, "Chardin battled to overcome his lack of natural talent." He is still...