Word: corots
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Corot's small oils of subjects like the view from the Pincio across Santa Trinita del Monte and the panorama of Rome below, and his studies of rustic places like Civita Castellana, were never meant to be shown in public. Until 1849 none were. They were intended solely as preparations for larger studio compositions, but these rarely have the elan and directness of his first insights. For him they were triggers of memory. "After my excursions," he wrote, "I invite Nature to come and spend a few days at home with me; brush in hand, I hunt for nuts...
...Corot was lucky in having a modest private income--his parents were well-off dressmakers in Paris--and he did not need to labor constantly on the big machines that spelled success or failure at the Salons. So he could work on the studies for their own sake, and these, not the bigger works, entitle him to be seen as a true precursor of Impressionism. Many of his lithographs and etchings of landscape have the same vitality. Full of wind and weather, they show pleasure in the mark for its own sake--Corot was a terrific scribbler at his best...
...official Corot is generally a bore. The nymphs, shepherds and Sileni who decorate the big classical landscapes of his middle years are inert and stereotyped. He didn't have the temperament for the sensuousness Poussin put in his classical scenes; Corot's nymphs are just studio models. In Bacchante with a Panther, 1860, the girl teasing the big cat with what appears to be a dead starling looks like Mlle. Goosepimple, thanks to the gray French skies above and the damp earth under her bottom...
...Corot was much better at trees than people, let alone pagan divinities. His weakest drawings are of the figure, his strongest of vegetable nature--one especially, an ink drawing of creepers on a rock done around 1827, has a wiry inquisitorial line and a fierce truth to the motif that remind one, without exaggeration, of Durer. In landscape his hand roamed free, giving the foreground hill in Volterra, the Citadel, 1834, a lively splotching of indeterminate dark scrub whose excited marks carry more visual weight than the distant hill town. But his early portraits are maladroit Ingres...
...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...