Word: circa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...example among many is Woman with a Coffeepot, circa 1895. One would need to go back 400 years, to Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto, to find a painted human figure of such monumental gravity. All is volume, all is power, not only the large masses--the head that seems hewn from some skin-colored rock, the torso and the flaring blue pyramid of the skirt, the cylindrical coffeepot and the cup with the spoon set vertically in it--but also the microforms, such as the knot tying the woman's apron at her waist, which has the finality...
...magisterial Still Life with Curtain and Flowered Pitcher, circa 1899, the heavy leaf-pattern curtain on the left and the folds of white cloth below it have the same sculptural density as the fruit and the jug, with its exquisitely suggested peony design. But there, on the right, Cezanne has another white cloth, its folds sharper and more geometrical, its surface unfinished, so that you see glimpses of table through it--and the balance is suddenly perfect, despite but actually because of this shift of gear. Then there is the play between mass and instability--how the fruit...
...last years, from 1865 or so until his death, Corot produced an exquisite series of small figure paintings, mostly of young women sitting before the easel in the brown clutter of his studio. Some remind you of Chardin, others are prophecies of Whistler. Interrupted Reading, circa 1870-73, is strikingly modern in its broadly painted triangular planes of muted color, regulated by two patches of black--the model's hair and her bodice--and relieved only by some red coral beads. Its Raphaelesque formal clarity looks back to neoclassicism but also forward to Picasso's dropsical women. It shows that...
...terrific nose for a story. One of the biggest in New York circa 1909 was illicit prizefighting, and Bellows made intensely vivid and memorable images of it. Ashcan painting, in its description of the Darwinian world of fists evoked by American realist writers like Frank Norris and Jack London, lagged behind literature by 10 years or more, but its attachment to images of clash and struggle aligned it squarely with the American cultural ideology of the day--Theodore Roosevelt's praise of the strenuous life...
...vivid example is The Music Lesson, circa 1662-64. The foreground is occupied by the elephantine bulk of a table draped in a Turkish carpet. Its thick folds of wool and the blue tracery on its shadowed flank, which looks dull in reproduction but fairly blazes in the original, delay your eye as it tries to get into the picture. More obstacles are built into the space between the carpet and the figures at the end of the room. There is a white pitcher on the table, a sky-blue chair with gleaming brass tack heads, and finally the voluptuous...