Word: lorrain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Arcadia was the humanist's Club Med. In it, nothing happens. Shepherds and nymphs, young soldiers and scholars, madonnas, saints and animals loll about in a state of pure being, with no future tense. Arcadia has ruins, sometimes quite grand ones -- as in Claude Lorrain's classical revisions of the pastoral landscape, here represented by the Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing, 1641 -- but Roman architecture does not include a stern call to Roman virtue and gravity. Arcadia's weather is always equable, and its views intimate and mellow. Above all, its location is not too far out of town...
...wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West...
...same context. In short, there is a real reason for its existence that justifies the expense and risk of bringing the work around the world. Only in recent years, with a cluster of major exhibitions devoted to the 17th century-"France in the Golden Age" at the Met, Claude Lorrain at the National Gallery, Ruisdael at the Fogg, and a few others-have Americans been able to clear their minds of prejudices in favor of the quattrocento and see what pleasure the baroque period holds. This show carries that project further...