Word: manet
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Clearly, Fischl wants an overall look that is not too finished, consistently "imperfect," with an air of unconcern for its own pictorial mechanism -- the creamy, dashed-off realism of a Manet oil sketch. But this requires a mastery over the detail and frequency of brushstrokes, and a certainty about the drawing embedded in them, that he has not yet attained. He will slide from a passage of near virtuoso colloquialism to one of awkward smearing and prodding, and not fix -- maybe not see -- the difference...
...become a tardy impressionist, imitating Pissarro's landscapes and Mary Cassatt's moppets. After ten years of work in Paris, Brittany and with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin was making his first real masterpieces, like The Ham, 1889, a still life that pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants adoring a wayside crucifix was also, perhaps, an allegory of Gauguin's opinion of himself: Christ's face is his schematic self-portrait, and the Breton women...
Sultan was born in Asheville, N.C., in 1951 and is certainly among the more gifted American artists of his generation. But this show's catalog hums with inflated comparisons and claims. "He seems formed in the Manet mold," writes one contributor, Ian Dunlop, adducing by way of proof that Sultan, like the great Edouard, is ambitious, paints images from "modern life," looks at old master paintings, etc. Sultan does have a crush on Manet; a small still life with asparagus pays homage to Manet's famous single asparagus stalk, and a little detail of masts and sails in Manet...
There are also more than enough works of the Impressionists to satisfy their most ardent fans Renoir, Degas. Manet--the Fogg has works by the whole lot. That is to say nothing of Rembrandt and the other Flemish hordes. some great modern painters and lots of wonderfully gruesome religious art. You can even go and gaze adoringly at Picassos should you wish to do so. Whatever your tastes the Fogg can cater to them; sumptuous nudes or tully draped Madonnas, tranquil still-lives or colorful battle scenes, sculpture or painting, ancient or modern, whatever takes your fancy...
...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...