Word: manet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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THERE CAN'T BE MANY PEOPLE TOday who would think of putting Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) among the giants of 19th century French painting--Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet or Cezanne. Yet in his lifetime he was regarded as one of the greatest landscapists who ever lived, and for most cultivated Frenchmen the very idea of comparing a bungler like Cezanne with their beloved Corot would have seemed faintly barbarous. The big show that opened in Paris last month--drawings and prints at the Bibliotheque Nationale, 163 paintings at the Grand Palais--marking the 200th anniversary of Corot...
...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, one of the most spectacular of which is in this show...
...only an American one. As a young man, he worked with Gustave Courbet. He knew, and was respected by, some of the finest artists in Paris: Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet. He appears (with Baudelaire, Manet and other French luminaries) in Henri Fantin-Latour's group portrait of the rising art stars of 1864, Homage to Delacroix. "This American is a great artist, and the only one of whom America can be justly proud," said Camille Pissarro. And Marcel Proust turned part of his name, unpronounceable by the French, into an anagram: he became the painter Elstir in A la Recherche...
...absurd to class him with Degas or Manet. He didn't have the range, the formal toughness or the breadth of human curiosity for that. Yet sometimes he approached them, as in his finest portrait, his 1872-73 study of the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle. When he sat for Whistler, Carlyle was 78 and heavy with fame, depression and guilt. All this is conveyed in the disturbed but massive black profile of the coat and in the tenderness of Whistler's treatment of the face...
...familiar and often reproduced it has become--comes up fresh whenever you see it. This diffident son of a Nyack, New York, dry-goods merchant had a long working life, almost all of it in America, and a sober style, some of which came from France and particularly from Manet and Daumier. One of his few public utterances--in 1927, to the effect that "now or in the near future, American art should be weaned from its French mother"--used to be taken by cultural America-firsters as a manifesto of secession, but it wasn't. He knew that real...