Word: corots
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Part of the problem is, and long has been, the fakes. Corot was so popular on both sides of the Atlantic that he was, notoriously, the most faked artist of the 19th century. Corot painted 3,000 pictures, the saying went, of which 10,000 have been sold in America. His late work in particular--those silvery, atmospheric nymph-and-willow scenes like Memory of Mortefontaine, 1864, elegiac in tone and populated by rustic figures who descended from Claude Lorrain's shepherdesses--fetched record prices at a time when Impressionism still seemed rather daring to most Americans, and painting posthumous...
...show's catalog gives some bizarre detail on this, including the case of an obsessive Corot collector in France, a Dr. Jousseaume, who died in the early 1920s and left a collection of 2,414 works by Corot, every one of which turned out to be phony. And then there were the innocent copies, the homages to Corot by later artists and the copies of Corot by Corot himself. No wonder that even certifiably genuine Corots began to look just a little suspicious...
...reputation? Largely because he was seen as a living bridge between the classical tradition of French landscape and contemporary painting, whether by contemporary you meant the Barbizon painters of the mid-19th century, like Theodore Rousseau and Charles Daubigny, or the more recent vision of Monet and the Impressionists. Corot's career began in the 1820s, at a time when classical landscape--the ideal scene with temples, ruins and mellow boscage, populated by figures out of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Vergil's Georgics--was still very much a part of French art. Its greatest exponents, Nicolas Poussin and Lorrain, were...
Constable's paintings were the sensation of the 1824 Paris Salon, and their complex freshness came as a revelation to younger French artists, including the 28-year-old Corot, who was on the verge of departing for Italy. Today it's hard to imagine the delicious feelings of initiation and surrender with which foreign artists once went to Italy. Each view in Rome, every corner of Naples or Latium, seemed impregnated with meaning--by the memory of artists who had painted them before, by the presence of Antiquity and by the mellow beauty of the light. But to see Nature...
Despite his doubts--and he was a man of excessive modesty--Corot's early responses to Italy have a special place in his work, and in French art as a whole. They are small, painted on the spot and marvelously fresh, done with a truth of tone worthy of Constable. Tone, not line or color, describes the distances and shapes in these studies. Corot painted them directly, with a loaded brush, and they show an extreme sensitivity to atmosphere. Their light is clear and mild, and under it each plane in the jumble of Roman roofs and walls becomes part...