Word: gauguins
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...years as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Sunnylands is a modernist San Simeon on 208 acres. Built in 1964 at a cost of $5 million, the mansion alone covers nearly an acre. Inside is a major collection of impressionist (Renoir, Monet) and postimpressionist (Gauguin, Van Gogh) paintings...
There has long been a tendency to repeat, without checking it against the pictures, Gauguin's irritable verdict that Pissarro was a good second-rater, "always wanting to be on top of the latest trend ... he's lost any kind of personality, and his work lacks unity." So although there has been no lack of Degas shows, Monet retrospectives, homages to Cézanne and museum tributes to Bazille or Caillebotte, Pissarro has remained less known-an irony, since, with his peculiar steadfastness and probity, he was the linchpin of the impressionist group...
...work of "these chemists who pile up little dots," as Gauguin contemptuously named the pointillists, was to the 1890s what constructivism would be to the 1920s: the house style of Utopian socialism in its various forms. Pissarro was a fervent anarchist, and his dot-crusted scenes of idyllic rural labor (as stylized and unreal, in some ways, as any 18th century pastoral) are attempts, not always successful, to convey an ideal vision of social dignity based on freely shared work. In this he was the heir of Millet as well-though he certainly did not know peasant life as Millet...
...belief that art history was continuous, that no fundamental break had occurred between the high traditions of European classicism (exemplified by Paolo Uccello in the 15th century and Ingres in the 19th, both of whom he worshiped) and the work of the founding fathers of modernism: Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. To understand one, you had to work through the other. Gorky was under no illusions about how much time that would take; in fact, it would be almost 20 years before he found a pictorial syntax entirely...
Obviously, these early modernists were formalists; what artist, at some level, is not? But their ambitions went beyond that, into the realm of symbolic meaning. This was particularly true of Van Gogh and of Gauguin, who eventually went to Tahiti in order to paint huge allegories of human fate. One sees this interest already in Brittany paintings like Woman in the Hay, an image drenched in anonymous sexuality, whose half-nude peasant woman sprawled on the hay is quoted directly from one of the female slaves in Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. These early modernists were not, after...