Word: manet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thinks of him, with reason, as quintessentially "German." Yet his art had the same relationship (or lack of one) to German expressionism as Edouard Manet's did to French impressionism. Beckmann was not interested in the pseudotranscendental aspects of expressionism--its yearnings for a higher world and bleatings about this lower one, its way of ducking into the "mystical" and the "primitive" as an escape from the politics of immediate experience. To him, as to the Dadaists in Berlin, this was for air heads. "My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art," he noted...
...first transfixed its audience in the preparatory paintings for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon three generations before. No exhibition in memory has been so full of eyes (or of anuses and genitals, his other fetish objects). The late work attacks and reattacks art-history themes, figures by Rembrandt, Poussin, Manet, Delacroix, Rousseau. It is culturally saturated, as well as drenched in his macaronic, theatrical and self-mocking sexuality. And yet its obsessive project is to so generalize the image of the figure as to remove it from the sphere of "culture." Picasso hardly ever used models; every figure comes...
...excruciating Fishbowl Fantasy, 1867, is crammed with everything that was worst in the taste of Victorian America). Still, it is hard to see how the difficult task of presenting 18th and 19th century American painting to its home audience, as well as to the city of Ingres, Delacroix and Manet, could have been better done. What the French will make of it, of course, is an open question, since the only premodern American artists known in France are Whistler, Eakins and Cassatt...
...created a new symbolic language, both verbal and nonverbal, to convey information. Middle-class women no longer got pregnant, for example; they became enceinte, or were "in an interesting condition." Painters and sculptors thrilled staid merchants with luscious nudes fig-leafed with titles like Venus Now Wakes. Manet's Olympia shocked the salon of 1865 not because she was naked but because she looked back at the viewer with the defiant eyes of a thoroughly contemporary Parisian courtesan. On second thought, said Freud, who is one of Gay's principal heroes, perhaps "a certain measure of cultural hypocrisy...
...Spanish Republic, a lengthy series that lasted some 30 years and ended after the death of Franco and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Spain, are best seen as an American pendant to Picasso's Guernica, though with different imagery. Black in the hands of some painters-a Manet, a Goya, a Matisse-is a color, not an absence of light; and el negro Motherwell, as the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti called it, sometimes acquires a walloping chromatic power...