Word: courbets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Courbet relished this reputation: "I am the first and unique artist of this century. The others are students and drivelers." No artist, up to then, had ever set himself so firmly against the reigning taste of his day, and none since Jacques-Louis David had had a stronger sense of political mission. Moreover, unlike the great salon artists who went before him, Courbet was capable of lavishing enormous trouble on a work doomed to unsalability, since it had no comprehensible message: this was his masterpiece, The Studio of the Artist, 1855, which he subtitled "a real allegory, setting forth...
Nevertheless, the idea of a fusion between radical art and radical politics, of art as a direct means of social subversion and reconstruction, has haunted the avant-garde since Courbet's time. On the face of it, it has a kind of logic. By changing the language of art. you affect the modes of thought; and by changing thought, you change life. The history of the avant-garde up to 1930 was suffused with various, ultimately futile, calls to revolutionary action and moral renewal. They were all formed by the belief that painting and sculpture were still the primary...
...seek such an audience, to think of it as the normal and proper one for avant-garde art, was to take a step back from the ideal of the artist as Public Man that had been embodied in Courbet's career. It meant running for the constituency of the exception and the misfit, not the majority. One main strand of the avantgarde, as it developed in the 19th century and bequeathed its composition to the 20th, hated crowds and democracy, wished to absent itself from the political agora, and stood on its own rights to develop in what Joyce...
...Folies-Bergère, 1882. Both works, in a sense, point forward to the "objective," molecular constellations of dabbed light from which Seurat assembled his figures on the speckled lawn of the Grande Jatte. If the origins of one aspect of the avant-garde lie with Courbet, those of the other are to be found in Manet: in detachment and irony, art contemplates its nature as a language, without hope of changing the world. The quest for formal perfection and the renewal of visual speech are enough...
...chief of the Met's Department of European Paintings, has arranged a survey of the century's progress that is unmatched anywhere. The central space is devoted to the century's culminating stylesimpressionism and postimpressionism. With 13 flanking galleries, he could give one to Courbet alone, three to Degas, others to Millet and the Barbizon School. Besides a solid representation of the century's early neoclassicists and a number of Goyas, the new spaces allow a full sampling of the sentimental and pretentious salon art that the century's avant-garde...