Word: courbets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...formal art education began in Paris in the early '20s. Balthus shied away from politico-aesthetic groups like the surrealists. After such a childhood, who needed the insecurities of the avantgarde? Instead he settled down to study the fathers: Poussin and Courbet in France and, supreme among the Italians, Piero della Francesca. The clarity and density of Piero's figures, their presence as signs in geometrically ordered space-that was what impressed Balthus. He also made designs for the stage, which in turn influenced his painting. Theater-plus-Piero gave the cues to The Street, 1933, an exceedingly...
...side of Balthus not predicted by The Street was suggested, in 1937, by The Mountain. This enormous scene of young hikers in the Bernese Oberland holds so many references-from Courbet, Caspar David Friedrich and Poussin, for starters-that it approaches pastiche. It creaks with the ambition to be a masterpiece and is regularly taken for one, though its composition has the spottily grand look of an academic mistake. But the figure of Balthus's blond wife, hands stretched above her head, rising from the dark plateau into the zone of early-morning sun, is a prime lyric invention...
...work as a constant affront to received taste. Painting the studio nude, Pearlstein declared allegiances very different from those common in the New York art world of the late '50s. In neither hedonism nor irony nor self-expression, he wanted to go back and start from Gustave Courbet, painting the naked body in a spirit of detached, colloquial reportage, as though all the proscriptions against figure painting had lost their magic. To suppose this was not a radical act, one would need to know very little about the pressures of ideology and convention in the New York art world...
...18th century the Popes began to lose their enthusiasm for live art, and the men who transformed painting in the 19th century-Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Cezanne-excited not a flicker of interest in the Vatican. In the 20th century papal patronage guttered out, except for a few ornamental mediocrities like Giacomo Manzii's door for St. Peter's. Modern Popes disliked modern art because they associated it with liberalism. Eventually the problem vanished: John Paul II would learn to use television as his predecessors had used fresco...
...also produced, in the spirit of old-master quotation that ran through his silk-screened work in the early 1960s, a suite of variations on well-known paintings: Botticelli's Venus, that hardy standby of the Pop sensibility the Mona Lisa, and Gustave Courbet's rosy, meaty image of two lesbians-one of them Whistler's mistress-sprawled in amorous sleep. At times, as in All Abordello Doze 3, 1982, the degree of interference by overprinting, cutting and juxtaposition almost buries the motif in a landslide of variations, and yet Rauschenberg's close, laconic grasp...