Word: orsay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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, not just in its most famous images; in any case, the curators have secured other magisterial works from French museums, such...
...massive scholarly effort -- literally massive: the catalog, with its essays by art historians Jean Sutherland Boggs, Douglas Druick, Henri Loyrette, Michael Pantazzi and Gary Tinterow, weighs a tad over 6 lbs. Thanks to their efforts and those of the three museums that mutually organized the show -- the Musee d'Orsay, the National Gallery of Canada and the Met -- we have the means to see this extraordinarily complicated and sometimes elusive painter with a completeness not possible before...
...Washington and which, after closing there July 31, will be seen through the fall at the Art Institute of Chicago and in early 1989 at the Grand Palais in Paris, is of this kind. When the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris found they were all planning separate shows on different aspects of Gauguin -- his prints, his Brittany paintings and his Tahitian work -- it seemed obvious to merge the three. The result, thanks to its curators (Francoise Cachin and Claire Freches-Thory in France, Richard Brettell and Charles F. Stuckey...
...show 19th century taste as it was, not as it ought, in the eyes of a retrospective modernism, to have been. Orsay, one feels, was right to include the work of these heroic flatterers and contaminated virtuosos. Not only are they better than we once thought, but they help one recognize the true achievement of the avant-garde alternative. The triumph of the avant- garde over the pompiers has been so complete that one can now look at the losers with calm interest and historical understanding. This is not a matter of camp revival, as some moralists insist...
...this way Orsay points to the future, for the old relation between museums and contemporary painting has switched in the 1980s. A hundred years ago you had brilliant painters and dumb museums; today the reverse. It is inconceivable that the marginality and hamfistedness of most of what passes for major painting at the end of the 20th century could have been taken seriously in the Paris of Degas, Cezanne and Rodin. Under the heat of the market, avant-garde and pompier have simply fused into an opaque, complacent lump. Only in the museum, it seems, can the full evidence...