Word: nudes
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Unlike the Courbet exhibition in Paris in 1977, it leaves out several of the most ambitious Second Empire paintings: A Burial at Ornans, The Meeting, The Bathers -- with its "Hottentot Venus," as one hostile critic called her, that waddling wardrobe of a nude that became the scandal of the 1853 Salon. Also missing is Courbet's "real allegory," The Painter's Studio, which hangs at the Musee d'Orsay. Such things can no longer be moved. Without them, can a Courbet retrospective make full sense? Emphatically yes. The character of Courbet the painter is richly distributed through his work...
...privileged folk in their shining taffetas are not exactly allegories; they are elaborations of mood, in which every pleat of fabric on a woman's turned back seems to carry its aura of psychological subtlety. And in Giorgione's Tempest, to this day no one really knows what the nude woman, young soldier and lightning flash are doing there...
...sensation. And in its early years at least, it was drawn to the discreet presence, strung along the shores of the Mediterranean, of an elegiac classical past. The figures in Matisse's fauve landscapes at St.-Tropez -- amply represented in this show -- are Arcadians with spots. The pale recumbent nude among the columnar tree trunks in his Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet, 1902, whose music is joined by the howling of a giant white poodle, is a reprise of innumerable earlier pastorals...
...being rhetorical. The surface develops by addition, sometimes over months, and contains an extraordinary range of nuances both in color and in texture: tremulous depths of pinkish-gray held within the sallow planes of a face, innumerable gradations of Venetian red and salmon pink in the body of a nude, rescued from mere allusiveness by the vehement drawing of shadow that gives Kossoff's work its tonal framework. Its solidity is relieved, almost involuntarily, by the whipping of skeins of pigment fallen directly from the brush, which work as a form of counterdrawing, lifting the thick surfaces from inertia...
Degas's "keyhole" bathers provoked the crisis of the Ideal Nude, whose last great exponent had been the man Degas most revered, Ingres. Yet their exquisite clarity of profile could not have been achieved without Ingres's example. In them, the great synthesis between two approaches that 30 years before had been considered the opposed poles of French art -- Ingres's classical line, Delacroix's romantic color -- is achieved. There is no clearer instance of the way in which true innovators like Degas do not destroy the past (as the mythology of avant-gardism insisted): they amplify...