Word: nineteenth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Many nineteenth century artists began their careers as sign painters or carpenters and never had much formal training in art. Often this lack of instruction freed them from a rigid approach. Some explored the country searching for ever more dramatic landscapes. Frederick Edwin Church traveled to South America and painted enormous canvasses of the dense jungle beside the Andes, Painting seemed an adventure of luck in finding the right seene. Artists must have carried their easels for miles before stopping before a view and setting up equipment among the leaves. On another large canvas Church painted the sunrise spreading redness...
Chairs, clocks, tables and china, arranged in Victorian abundance illustrate shifts in popular taste that marched through revivals of the Gothic, French Empire and Romantic styles. The nineteenth century public highly valued the furniture that warmed their houses. The mixture of decorative art with painting and sculpture in the Metropolitan exhibition illustrates the ties between the two during the last century. Whole rooms have been recreated by the museum with yellow silk chairs and gilt chandeliers to look the way they once did in American mansions. The style of the rooms is more ornate than the plain style...
...simple realism of nineteenth century American art made paintings understandable to the contemporary public. Ironically, Americans trained on the values of the European tradition and born in the midst of Abstract Expressionism feel removed from this severe realism today. We look at the simple style of the last century critically, admiring the honesty, yet realizing that it wanders far from the quality of Europe. Viewers need to look at labels for the artist's name...
Unlike today, artists in the nineteenth century had no problem selecting a subject for their work. All aspects of the country invited them to paint-to paint things that no one had painted before. They recorded events, people, plains and waterfalls in a sparse. direct style. Though these artists used traditional methods of perspective, often minimal training and a choice of unusual subjects makes the work look specifically American. Figures are stiff, sometimes doll-like in position even though details of appearance are neatly printed out. Artists seized concrete elements around him to fit into the crisp lines...
...exhibition itself reinforces this feeling of distance from the twentieth century by having so many pieces of actual furniture and whole rooms where you can stick your head over the rail into nineteenth century atmosphere. The material presence of the decoration-the glass, the silk, the gold knick-knacks-settles the paintings in history...