Word: courbets
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...COURBET RECONSIDERED, Brooklyn Museum, New York City. Vast landscapes, lavish nudes and masterful portraits in an ambitious retrospective of paintings by the 19th century realist. Through...
Whatever else may be wrong with the late American art industry, we are living in the golden age of the retrospective exhibition. One by one, the great artists of the 19th century have been done over the past decade: Cezanne, Manet, Courbet, Van Gogh, Gauguin -- and now Edgar Degas. We may deplore the crowds at these shows, the souvenir selling, the social circus and the TeleTron tickets at up to $7.75 apiece, an outrageous tax on knowledge. Earplugs -- preferably not attached to Acoustiguide gadgets -- and yogic detachment are needed. There are, as crusty old Degas said, some kinds of success...
...wear two hats," Laclotte recalls, "and sometimes it gave me a headache." For the Louvre is by nature a monopoly, with the gravitational pull of a black hole. So many of the canonical masterpieces of the 19th century -- Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and his Death of Sardanapalus, Courbet's The Studio and Funeral at Ornans and so on, ad infinitum -- are in the Louvre that Laclotte was faced with appalling difficulties in getting anything to cross the Seine to Orsay. Moreover, since he was only on loan to Orsay, he wanted to go back to an undepleted Louvre when...
...Francois Mitterrand came in, and Mitterrand let it be known that the 19th century must begin in 1848, the year of populist revolutions and the collapse of monarchies, in which Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and the grandeur of French bourgeois culture began to move toward its apogee. Courbet, not Delacroix, would thus be the emblematic figure. As for the end of the 19th century, there was never any doubt about that: it was 1914, the beginning of World...
...narrative" of the galleries is split in half. On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are -- Daumier, Millet, the Barbizon painters, Fantin-Latour, the rural sentimentalists like Jules Breton, culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion). On the right are academic idealism and romanticism, Ingres and his heirs, Delacroix and his, smooth recipes of Grecian flesh...