Word: manet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...show is a record of 15 years of work with one model at a depth of detail that would be utterly fascinating with a greater artist -- a Manet, a Degas or even a Winslow Homer -- but that at Wyeth's level of achievement seems almost tiresome. The bulk of the show is pencil sketches and watercolors, grouped around a dozen or so finished images in drybrush and tempera. To study an artist's sketches is to go behind the scenes of his talent, to see how the mechanisms of his pictorial thought work; one sees each twist in the evolution...
...white sky) looks so like Siberia. To gauge how the roots of his imagination go, one need only compare his painting of the nude Helga with a black ribbon round her neck, face averted, floating in a soup of dark shadow, with the work on which it is based: Manet's Olympia. There, one has all the contrast between what is deep and what is genteel, between brazen, ironic intelligence and mere sensibility, between the harsh confrontational skills of a great talent and the tepid virtuosity of a popular one. This show is too much of a medium-good thing...
...price ever paid for a work of art. The multimillion-dollar marvel is now a commonplace of the '80s: a Turner went for $10 million in 1984, a Mantegna for $10.4 million and a Van Gogh for $9.9 million in 1985, and a Rembrandt for $10.3 million and a Manet for $11 million in 1986. Nevertheless, this one brought in more than three times the previous record established in 1983 with the sale of the 12th century illuminated Gospels of Henry the Lion for $11.9 million...
Klein also took to plunging in among crowds to shoot point blank, so that faces meet the lens with mostly tentative expressions. As Manet had done a century earlier in his paintings, Klein recognized in the suspended gaze one of the chief signifiers of the modern temper. But judged by the canons of good photography, those pictures looked fumbled, invertebrate. Klein's anarchic strengths went unappreciated by eyes looking for nice tonal gradations and the standard ironies. Where were the compositional ligaments that held even the airiest Andre Kertesz photo in an iron fist? Where was the fine printing...
...trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion). On the right are academic idealism and romanticism, Ingres and his heirs, Delacroix and his, smooth recipes of Grecian flesh and turbulent Byronic visions of nature. Beyond Courbet on the left, you have Manet; beyond Thomas Couture on the right, there is Degas. To stand in the sculpture-avenue between them, savoring the confrontation, framed in their respective portals, of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe with Degas's Bellelli Family, each the masterpiece of its maker's youth, is to receive a museum experience...