Word: painter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that, and a painter of unassailable, though uneven, greatness! Courbet has become one of the titans of radical nostalgia. There cannot be a political artist alive who does not dream of having Courbet's sweeping breadth of access to the public. "Courbet Reconsidered," the show of 97 paintings and drawings, organized by the art historians Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, currently at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City (and scheduled to open at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in February), is not, and could not have been, a "complete" show. But it is the first attempt by an American...
...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, not just in its most famous images; in any case, the curators...
...Brooklyn: landscape, portraiture, animal painting, social commentary, erotica. And from them Courbet rises more vividly and intensely now than ever before in living memory, at least in America. Courbet -- this combative, ambitious, narcissistic and earthy man, crazy about women, convinced of his own historical mission -- thought he was the painter of his time. His egotism still grates. What school did he belong to? "I am Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one. I am the first and unique artist of the century; the others are students or drivelers...
What one sees today, especially in Brooklyn, is a different Courbet. He is a painter immersed both in popular art and in the traditions of his medium (Caravaggio, the Le Nains, Corot). He is inventive, yes, but not in a burn- the-Louvre way. He is an empiricist (though not without sentimental moments) for whom the sense of touch preceded that of sight. What the vibration of light would be to Monet, the force of gravity was to Courbet. It is the physical law that insinuates itself into almost every one of his images, confirming their materiality and stressing their...
RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Formica and Celotex are among the odd materials employed by this enigmatic but important American painter and sculptor. Through...