Word: gauguins
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...Elderfield points out in a catalog essay, Matisse's luck with the critics has always been peculiar. At the outset, part of the tiny modern-art public in Paris thought his work incoherent, ugly. Others, like Gauguin's friend Maurice Denis, praised its absolutist devotion to "painting in itself, the pure act of painting." But there was never a shortage of critics who saw Matisse as a kind of magisterial lightweight. "It is a modiste's taste," wrote the poet Andre Salmon in 1912, "whose love of color equals the love of chiffon...
European modernism "primitivized" Johnson, as though a feedback loop were running from the Cubists' and Expressionists' use of tribal African art to a black artist in a Danish fishing village. "I myself feel like a primitive man," he told an interviewer in 1935, echoing the modernist founding fathers (Gauguin, Van Gogh), "like one who is at the same time both a primitive and a cultured painter." In essence, as the sculptor Martin Puryear points out in the catalog, European modernism let Johnson see himself anew; it provoked him into negotiating "his racial dilemma as a black artist moving between several...
...historic events in the life of the modern museum: the collaboration between U.S. institutions and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux on a series of retrospectives of the great French artists of the 19th century. Edouard Manet in 1983; Vincent van Gogh in 1984 and 1986; Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas in 1988; Claude Monet in 1990 -- all these, done at the highest pitch of curatorial skill, have redefined the School of Paris...
...reinforced by legacies from Stephen Clark, Sam Lewisohn and Robert Lehman. Annenberg's paintings include several Cezannes, most conspicuously the great 1902-06 panorama of Mont Sainte-Victoire, so different from the Met's more constricted version of the same subject. The collection includes works by Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, and a group of Monets from the 1870s -- a phase of the master's work not well represented at the Met until...
...Shepherds may not be by Rubens at all; the Titian, not by Titian. The Leonardo pages, installed in a sort of dim mortuary chapel of their own, look ridiculously anticlimactic. The Impressionist work is as dull as could be. And, except for the Van Gogh and one early Gauguin, so is the more modern material. Only the Daumier holdings have any depth. One is left with the impression that Hammer had no eye at all, no feeling for art; that he bought like a bad shot firing into the middle of a flock of birds and, except...