Word: chiaroscuro
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Corinth's capacities as draughtsman are somewhat extended in his series of self-portraits. They are by no means inept but they are far from au juste. They simply lack authority, and this is not quite enough. His illustrations for Gulliver's Travels are more happily resolved through chiaroscuro; but at this point one tends to view alternative techniques with a distrustful eye. It is significant that Rembrandt, the master of chiaroscuro in paint, worked in his drawings for complete structural clarity...
...settings for the drunken brawl and the killing of Roderigo. Welles' direction and camera work are virtuosic throughout: his untiring inventiveness is ever apparent; and he is a master of black-and-white, from a close-up of part of a white robe through all manner of chiaroscuro to a totally blackened screen. Indeed, so prolific are his ideas that some sequences of camera angles and shots speed by too rapidly. And who else would have dared to have Othello's final speech delivered straight upwards by a disservered head? The whole visual treatment, furthermore, is strikingly enhanced...
Among the 160-odd illustrations in the show, one highlight was a little chiaroscuro woodcut attributed to Titian, which served as the frontispiece to an edition of Aretino's poems published in 1537. Titian surely would not have looked down on such an assignment; his greatest paintings were also illustrations-mainly of the Bible and of pagan myths. Whether actually Titian's or not. the Met's woodcut of a poet dreamily worshiping his muse shows a humanistic spirit typical of the 16th century, when artists took life itself for their province, describing it largely in terms...
Bats & Patches. But Manet's manner was even more revolutionary than his matter. He ignored the traditional chiaroscuro, the rich interplay of light and shadow, that was Giorgione's chief strength. Giorgione modeled every form with exquisite subtlety and bathed all together in soft, golden light. Manet's traditional contemporaries tried to do the same, and failed, getting a gloomy, tobacco-juice effect. But people were used to it, and found their way about in the sunless brown caves of contemporary painting as readily as bats. The "transparent atmosphere" that Manet had striven for and achieved...
...Chiaroscuro does not pretend to tell all. It is, as John amiably explains, but a "rough cross section of a part of my career . . . No doubt everything comes out in the wash eventually, but I see no reason to anticipate this process and spoil other people...