Word: courbets
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...himself not only against the visual stimuli of the Cote d'Azur but against the heritage of the 19th century, whose former citizen he was. Its masters speak both to and from his Nicois canvases. The hushed green density of Large Landscape, Mont Alban, 1918, is an amalgam of Courbet and Corot, though the slow, wristy drawing that drives the eye round the curve of the road and follows the slant of the windblown pines is entirely Matisse's own. The modulation of silvery grays (jug of water, belly of sole) with a few touches of red within the ambient...
...department's youngest full professor, newcomer Timothy J. Clark, constitutes an untraditional wing of the tradition-oriented department. "He burst onto the scene in his thirties with two fabulous books on Courbet--they were an outburst of fresh air in a jaded field, and we hired him," says Grabar, former department chairman...
Beckmann aimed to be a psychological--if not a literal--realist in a bad age: the Courbet of the cannibals. His work crystallized in the face of two major subjects, the first World War (in which he served the German army as a volunteer medical orderly, until the unremitting chaos and death of trench fighting drove him into mental collapse in 1915) and the city. He was not the first artist to discover how the imminence of death can free the imagination, but he was utterly frank about it. "Since I have been under fire, I live through every shot...
...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...