Word: manet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Japanese Michelangelo or Van Gogh (or perhaps one should say that the Japanese Van Gogh is Van Gogh). The very idea of the avantgarde, that ruling myth in terms of which a century of artists from Manet to Joseph Beuys is conventionally discussed, is purely Western and has never had more than a surface appeal to the Japanese. The idea of cultural norms based on confrontation and "radical" displays of ego strikes them as embarrassing. The scheme whose parody is now being played to exhaustion among the graffitists and plate breakers of Soho-culture as a series of self-conscious...
...connoisseurs of enigma, there is A Dead Soldier by an unknown Neapolitan hand (all attributions having failed so far), which inspired Manet's Dead Toreador. The painting is a link between Caravaggio's shadow-theater and, through Salvator Rosa, the world of 19th century romanticism. It shows a young man in half-armor lying stiff and composed on the floor of a cave (some mountain charnel-house, perhaps) surrounded by rainy twilight and the glimmer of bones, with a curl of smoke still issuing from an extinguished votive lamp. A vanitas? A more personal lamentation? Impossible...
...18th century the Popes began to lose their enthusiasm for live art, and the men who transformed painting in the 19th century-Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Cezanne-excited not a flicker of interest in the Vatican. In the 20th century papal patronage guttered out, except for a few ornamental mediocrities like Giacomo Manzii's door for St. Peter's. Modern Popes disliked modern art because they associated it with liberalism. Eventually the problem vanished: John Paul II would learn to use television as his predecessors had used fresco...
...exemplifies the boldness, not to say the rashness, with which Soyer has reached into the past for forms that have faded away after a century or more of desuetude. His picture is modeled after Hommage à Delacroix by Henri Fantin-Latour, who in 1864 lined up seven artists, including Manet and Whistler, and three writers, including Baudelaire, who had been Delacroix's admirers. Fantin-Latour then judiciously posed them beside a portrait of the great French Romantic painter. The composition is as simple as the relationships. Soyer, on the other hand, chose a much more difficult situation to compose...
...tricks on his own autocratic camera. Gordon Willis has shot the pastoral exteriors in delicate earth tones. In one lovely shot, Steenburgen, a backwoods madonna, reclines in the high grass and gently places a large, soft hat over her face. Camera and subject have relaxed into a moment of Manet beauty...