Word: courbets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Courbet looked very hard and had a method," Welliver remarks to the writer Edwin Denby in the catalogue. "Bierstadt did not look very hard and had a method, and de Kooning makes it up as he goes along ... I look very hard, then make it up as I go along." The idea of "sub lime" American landscape is fairly worn currency by now; there are too many generalized cliches of in stant grandeur attached to it. What saves Welliver's sense of awe at large scale is his sense of fact...
...whole tradition of French landscape runs through Pissarro's work. He is a link between the weighty, materialist vision of Courbet and the molecular analyses of impressionism, and the best of his landscapes possess an unremitting gravity of construction. Everything in a painting like The "Côte du Jallais," Pontoise, 1867, is, so to speak, freighted with scruple, rendered dense by inspection-the blue air and clouds no less than the swatches of plowed and seeded field and the massed trees. Its low tones and construction by horizontal bands make one think of Corot, but its directness...
...course in America that would have suggested that Friedrich was a painter of comparable importance to Géricault or even Delacroix, or that the work of Wilhelm Leibl or Hans Thoma might be anything better than an able but provincial reaction to that of Gustave Courbet. It was not always so; last century, Munich influenced American artists even more than Paris. There are plenty of parallels, if not exact concordances, between the infinite longings expressed in German romantic art and the sense of pantheistic immanence, God-over-the-Hudson, that ran through American nature painting in the mid-19th...
...artists in the show, like Manet himself, or Gustave Courbet or Jean Frangois Millet, have secure reputations as masters. Almost all the rest, whose paintings have been exhumed and whose biographies have been researched with indefatigable diligence by the show's curator, Art Historian Gabriel P. Weisberg of the Cleveland Museum of Art (where the show originated last November), are minor figures. But that is not the show's point. Rather, what Weisberg and his colleagues have tried to do is re-complicate our view of the 19th century and fill in some of the details...
...conspectus of styles, manners and approaches in the show is somewhat muffled by the lack of key paintings by fundamental masters of realism like Courbet or Honore Daumier. Moreover, there is no way of drawing a hard-and-fast line between the realist enterprise and that of the impressionists. Although artists like Degas and Manet are represented, and although there are some exquisite paintings by figures on the edge of the impressionist group-like Henri Fantin-Latour, whose portrait of his two sisters embroidering and reading is one of the most affecting icons of intimacy in all 19th century...