Word: manet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Created by the Met's Gary Tinterow and the French art historian Henri Loyrette, chief curator of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, it has drawn in an astonishing number of major works -- nearly 30 Manets; more than that number of Monets; and work by a whole gamut of artists from Renoir to Cezanne and Whistler, from Frederic Bazille to academicians like Jean-Leon Gerome and even William Bouguereau. It focuses on the early years of the movement, the 1860s, before "New Painting" became controversial with the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. It asks, What formed Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir...
...most solid, stubborn and material painter imaginable, Gustave Courbet. A Renoir like Bather with a Terrier, 1870, could hardly exist without the example of Courbet's wardrobe nudes. Courbet was the doubting Thomas of painting, the great empiricist who wanted to verify everything by touch, and his influence pervades Manet's work as well...
There is a standard story of Impressionism: how it rose in opposition to brown-soup or frothy-pink "academic" art, how its icebreaker was Manet's Le | Dejeuner sur l'Herbe at the Salon of 1863, and how it chucked out past art (history painting, the academic portrait) in the interest of unmediated vision. This needs a grain of salt, and the Met's show administers several pounds of it, in the form of a prelude gallery that sketches the main contents of the official Paris Salon of 1859, the year in which, most observers concurred, the once unquestioned supremacy...
...Sharp Appetites" consists of three different approaches to the phenomenon of the female body in visual culture. "Fleshbags" is the most ambitious part of the exhibition because it spans the historical scope of the construction of female sexuality. Displays ranging from details of Botticelli's "Venus" to Manet's "Olympia" to Playboy cartoons remind the viewer that this is not just a criticism of a contemporary issue, but rather the problematic perceptions of the female body have been deeply imbedded and indoctrinated into social standards. The responsibility of art is a central issue; female nudes once considered the norm...
...Hitler, Mao Zedong and not a few minor figures including Saddam Hussein -- has meant more to more people in the past 60 years than all the sanctified Modernist styles, from Fauvism to Pop, rolled together. Like Modernism's, its roots lay in the 19th century. If Modernism grew from Manet, Monet and Cezanne, Socialist Realism emerged from their conservative opposition -- the academic and narrative work that was the institutional art of Europe a century ago. In Russia the hugely popular landscapes and genre scenes of the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, led by Ilya Repin (1844-1930), were promoted as a mirror...