Word: courbets
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Dying Myth. People still build monuments, but the art died when the celebration stopped, when artists began consciously thinking of themselves as critics, not as exalters. of the established order. The mood was set a century ago when Gustave Courbet, one of the fathers of modern art, helped to topple the Vendome column during the Paris Commune of 1871. Modern democracy has flattened the myth of the hero, and there are still no good monuments to Churchill or Roosevelt; to imagine an equestrian bronze of Nixon or Pompidou on some future Capitol is to enter the realm of farce...
...Female Models on Apache Rug is painted with a kind of weighty probity that Courbet would have approved. Nothing is fudged or romanticized; all the attention is focused on an absolute truth of contour, the precise sensation of bunched, knotted or slack muscle, the laconic interplay between the cold skin and the darting, vivid pat terns of the fabric. No artist of Pearlstein's generation has so brave ly confronted the basic issues of realism-how to hold the utmost concreteness of three-dimensional volume within the strongest two-dimensional pattern. The vigorously modeled limbs and trunks...
Pulitzer's collection roots in the traditional--Rodin bronzes. Degas' dancers, and an enchanting portrait by Gustave Courbet. But the same tendencies toward the traditional that provide such great work, hinder Pulitzer's choice; the artists of the 60's look unexciting compared to the Master Photographers next door who treat their medium with a clarity and fervor. And although Pulitzer's masters shine, his efforts to furnish answers to problems of the creative eye, barely ask the primary questions. With Harvard's new committee to investigate the situation of the undergraduate, arts program, the Fogg will acquire more progressive...
...capture that "truth," Caravaggio painted directly from the subject, like Courbet 250 years later (there are no known drawings by Caravaggio). The sense of physical presence in his early work is so strong that a painting like The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, circa 1594, with its swooning saint and plump, comforting angel, is almost a homosexual version of the entranced flesh that Bernini was later to carve in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Caravaggio's angels and Bacchuses habitually looked as if they had been picked up in a Trastevere wineshop, which, no doubt, they were. Saint Catherine...
Boudin introduced him to the idea of painting direct from the motif, en plein air. Painters like Constable and Turner had done this before but in watercolor; Courbet had done parts of his canvases on the scene and finished them in the studio. But the invention of ready-mixed oil paints in tubes made it possible for Boudin, and Monet after him, to carry through an entire painting in this way. Boudin's influence on his incomparably more gifted disciple was strong, and it can be seen as late as 1870 in the pearly sky, sand...