Word: neoclassicists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...browse through this show is to be vividly reminded of the continuities in the past two centuries of German art. Some are not altogether welcome. That gentle, scholarly neoclassicist Johann Tischbein, the friend and portraitist of Goethe, would have been aghast to see what German state culture in the 1930s got up to -- and yet the first item in this show, his elaborate drawing entitled The Power of Man, 1786, showing a hunter and his young companion on horseback dragging home the carcasses of a lion and a huge eagle, predicts many of the elements of Nazi classicism...
...notable exception is the work of a precocious 25-year-old named Jedd Garet, whose paintings seem to take their stylistic base from, of all things, late De Chirico- not the pre-1918 master of tailor's dummies and spare, aching urban spaces, but the pompous neoclassicist of the '30s. Coarsely colored and drawn with a kind of savvy crudeness, Caret's Flaming Colossus, 1980, resembles nothing so much as a black squid with humanoid ambitions, silhouetted against a conventionally "apocalyptic" background of fire. Yet on this preposterous level, it does work as an image, generating enough...
...Only when the 17th century-under the influence of Rubens and Bernini-demanded more intricate, twisting, rearing, active poses for the horse in art did the pervasive influence of these creatures decline. Yet even then it was soon to be revived in the 18th century by the great Venetian neoclassicist Antonio Canova...