Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...17th century the classical world was the locus of ideal beauty, but how did a Frenchman enter it? A writer could read Vergil without leaving Paris, but a painter had to go to Rome. There, ancient sculpture and architecture abounded; from them, antiquity could be reimagined. It was the strength of the reimagining, not just its archaeological correctness, that counted. Poussin's main regular job during his Roman years was drawing records of ancient sculpture for a rich antiquary and scholar named Cassiano dal Pozzo. This gave him excellent access to collections, and the time to develop the repertoire...
...idea that the goal of creative effort lay outside the field of allegory and moral precept was quite new in the 1860s, when Degas was coming to maturity as a painter. The highest art was still history painting, in which France had reigned supreme; but since 1855 practically the whole generation of history painters on whom this elevation depended -- above all, Delacroix and Ingres -- had died, and no one seemed fit to replace them. French critics and artists alike, and conservative ones in particular, felt a tremor of crisis, & as others would a century later as the masters of modernism...
Born in 1834 into a rich Franco-Italian banking family with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans, Degas was never short of money, and he never doubted his vocation as a painter, in which his family encouraged him. He was a shy, insecure and aloof young man; if one did not know this from the testimony of his friends, one would gather it from his early self-portraits, with their veiled look of mannerist inwardness acquired from Pontormo. It seems he was unusually devoid of narcissism: unlike almost every other 19th century painter one has heard of, he gave...
Nothing escaped Degas's prehensile eye for the texture of life and the myriad gestures that reveal class and work. He made art from things that no painter had fully used before: the way a discarded dress, still warm from the now naked body, keeps some of the shape of its wearer; the unconcern of a dancer scratching her back between practice sessions in The Dance Class, 1873-76; the tension in a relationship between a man and a woman (Sulking, 1869-71) or the undercurrent of violence in an affair (Interior, sometimes known as The Rape...
...complicated and sometimes elusive painter is seen with an unprecedented -- and probably never to be duplicated -- completeness in the huge show of more than 300 works being unveiled by the Metropolitan Museum this week. Never mind the crowds and souvenir selling. This retrospective superbly presents Degas as the exemplary realist, an artist who was an engine for looking, a being whose destiny was to study La Comedie Humaine...