Word: courbets
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...artist who feels mashed by critics can take comfort in what used to be written about Gustave Courbet. Consider the broadside he got from Alexandre Dumas fils in 1871: "Under what gardener's bell, with the help of what manure, as a result of what mixture of wine, beer, corrosive mucus and flatulent edema can have grown this sonorous and hairy pumpkin, this aesthetic belly, this imbecilic and impotent incarnation of the Self...
Down the line from Donatella to Courbet...
...mildly, post-Freudian. But the innovations of the past 40 years' art-the movements, polemics and epileptic spasms that form the twilight of the avant-garde-have not touched it at all. Against all odds, Balthus paints as though the tradition that runs from Donatello to Courbet had never broken. For that reason alone, any Balthus show compels interest; and the group of 24 paintings and drawings, ranging from 1934 to 1977, that went on view last week at Manhattan's Pierre Matisse Gallery is doubly fascinating, being the first view Americans have had of Balthus' newest...
History-the sense of accumulated time bearing on an image-gives Balthus' painting its weight. There is no more cultivated artist alive; certainly none whose paintings disclose a more strictly developed taste. They are suffused with references to Balthus' two main sources, Courbet (whose stolid, gawky children are the great-grandmothers of Balthus' adolescents) and the early Italian Renaissance The profiles of his girls have the slightly awkward purity of quattrocento medallion portraits. Nude in Profile, 1977, displays her pubescent body with the columnar grace of a figure by Piero della Francesca; light flows around the shallow...
...palace walls, firmly reminding the autocrats of Catholic Europe-Habsburg and Gonzaga, Stuart and Medici-that absolute power is absolutely delightful. Rubens was one of the greatest political artists who ever lived, but he had nothing to do with our modern idea of the engage painter: he was no Courbet, but utterly a man of the right. There is no trace of speculative thought in his elaborate allegories. He believed in monarchy, Catholic dogma and the divine right of kings. Fatherless after the age of nine, he reveled in serving strong, authoritarian men. Vitality burgeoning in the midst...