Word: courbets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...