Word: gautier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...death that we still like to see him as a death-haunted, irrational loner, pitted by his - temperament against his times -- the first skeptic of art, the titanic ancestor of surrealism. "It is when Goya abandons himself to his capacity for fantasy that he is most admirable," wrote Theophile Gautier in 1842. "No one can equal him in making black clouds, filled with vampires and demons, rolling in the warm atmosphere of a stormy night." The effect of this has been to pluck Goya...
...connect with spectacular areas of Romantic fantasy -- the dungeon beneath the cloister, the Grand & Inquisitor's icy hand on the red-hot iron, and an obsession with trance, death and the link between faith and cruelty. This Zurbaran was more or less written into cultural existence by Theophile Gautier in 1840, on a visit to Seville...
...shallow Oriental exoticism. He reveals his anti-aesthetic bias against the French Romantics, toward whom his brilliant criticism is considerably less kind. He denounces their tendency toward "formal creation." The chapter, "An Extended Orient: Exoticism" criticizes at length the borrowing of imagery by the French as sheer indulgence. Gautier's Avatar is dismissed as the work of an exploitive dilettante with a "strikingly apparent gift for painting generalized pictures." Similarly, Hugo's Orientales is dismissed as "meager picturesque Orient imposed upon Montparnasse landscape...