Word: courbets
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...sunlight with broken touches without "academic" preconceptions is strictly for the birds in the sunlit trees. What's wrong with the name Impressionism is that it suggests quick shots of fleeting things. Yet the main progenitor of New Painting was the most solid, stubborn and material painter imaginable, Gustave Courbet. A Renoir like Bather with a Terrier, 1870, could hardly exist without the example of Courbet's wardrobe nudes. Courbet was the doubting Thomas of painting, the great empiricist who wanted to verify everything by touch, and his influence pervades Manet's work as well...
...standing in for Phryne and which for Aspasia. In due course, movies like Spartacus and The Ten Commandments would satisfy the need once felt for Bible scenes, Greek agoras and Roman battles. What was left to painting was the here and now, and that was where Impressionism, child of Courbet's realism, came into its glory...
...moment that, in fact, the painter hadn't seen. And though Manet was not notable for his piety in real life, he tried to reinvigorate biblical painting with his great image of The Dead Christ and the Angels, 1864, just to show that he wasn't in thrall to Courbet's realism or to his anticlericalism -- to be really free, you have to rebel against the rebels...
...massive and dynamically arched trunk with the waiflike body of the sleeping girl in And the Bridegroom, 1993, evokes the gross strong men and tiny dancers of Picasso's Rose Period. The lanky bodies on the iron studio bed in Two Women, 1992, are a little like Courbet's lesbians, without the Second Empire titillation. A naked man on his back, one leg up and a sock dangling from the other foot, penis flopping askew, turns out to echo closely the pose of that Hellenistic image of postbacchanalian fatigue, the Barberini Faun. And so on. Freud doesn't quote ostentatiously...
...displayed, the museum points out that "the artist and his wife function in a manner not unlike the vacuum cleaners," which is true, though not perhaps as meant. The text compares the "shocking" character of Made in Heaven to other once shocking works of the past, such as Courbet's Burial at Ornans, Matisse's Woman with the Hat and Manet's Olympia. And yet it adds, "All this is not to say that Koons' art is equivalent to the greatest work of Manet or Matisse, or that of Jackson Pollock . . ." What a failure of nerve! How can such slurs...