Word: henry
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...Henri made a pilgrimage to Paris in 1888 and absorbed a fairly academic style of Impressionism during three years of study there. But it was his second trip to Paris in the mid-1890s that confirmed his direction as an artist. Dissatisfied with Impressionism as an art of insubstantial surfaces, he immersed himself in dark tonal painting, based on Manet and Frans Hals. He wanted the image to be not a shimmer of light but a lump in the mind, given urgency by slashing brushstrokes and depth by strong contrast. He liked Hals' vulgarity and reflected it in his portraits...
...Philadelphia, Henri's worldly, rebellious, effusive nature made him a magnet to younger artists, most of whom worked as illustrators for the Philadelphia press--Sloan, Glackens, Shinn and Luks. They drank together, had long poker sessions, bellowed poetry at one another and argued late into the night. Sloan recalled 50 years later that Henri was "a catalyst, an enthusiast ... with the pioneer's contempt for cant and aestheticism." Moreover, he was genuinely interested in the young, and was to inspire several generations of students--not only his younger contemporaries like Sloan and Bellows, but Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis...
...Henri and the rest had moved to New York, where an unparalleled field of subjects for painter-journalists awaited them. The artist, they all believed, must connect to the harsh facts of his society, especially in the city; then his art would draw life and staying power from its common subject matter. "His vest is slightly spotted; he is real," said Sloan approvingly of a visiting Irish painter, J.B. Yeats, father of the poet. Luks boasted that he could paint with a shoestring dipped in lard and tar. The artist, smearing oily gunk on a cloth with bristles, is immersed...
...most talented painters among them were Henri, Bellows and Sloan. Glackens turned into a late-blooming Impressionist, and Shinn was essentially an illustrator, while Luks' coarse, rhetorical talent produced a lot of formulaically macho painting leavened only by a few significant works, such as The Wrestlers...
...brilliantly responsive artist whose style looked modern, and in some respects was modern, without offending American conservatives. Bellows' reputation as a radical had more to do with his lowlife subjects and journalistic speed than with any avant-gardeness in the work. His political ideas, like those of Sloan and Henri, were in some general way socialist-anarchist without being particularly militant. He leaned toward a pastoral, unthreatening vision of the disorganized poor, spiced with humor, as in his portraits of tough Irish street urchins or the famous Forty-Two Kids, 1909--not, alas, in this show--depicting a swarm...