Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Italian, born in 1888 and raised partly in Greece-where his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads-he led a long, productive life, almost Picassian in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich, and in his early 20s, under the spell of a symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes. When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Eluard; before long De Chirico became one of the heroes of surrealism...
...become, and almost succeeded in becoming, a classicist. He imagined himself to be the heir of Titian. Rejected by the French avantgarde, he struck back with disputatious critiques of modernist degeneracy; for the next 60 years of his life, he remained an obdurate though not very skillful academic painter. He even took to signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter). The sheer scale of his failure-if that is the word for it-is almost as fascinating as the brilliance of his early talent. Naturally, a great deal of both has been hidden by the polemical dust, and last...
Thomas chose such anonymity because he had become an instant personality. He was, no less, the man who had finally solved the mystery of Masquerade. That fantasy for children by British Author-Painter Kit Williams has been a surprise bestseller for almost three years (1.5 million copies in eight languages). Climaxing a feverish 18-month hunt, Thomas had dug up the $10,000 bejeweled golden rabbit in Ampthill Park, Bedfordshire...
Meanwhile, the show in the existing Fogg continued to prove the worth of the museum. It is a retrospective-improbably enough, the only one ever held-of 56 paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael, who was by general consent the greatest landscape painter to live in 17th century Holland. It will not go elsewhere in the U.S., so anyone with a serious interest in the art of landscape should get to the Fogg before April 11. We see Ruisdael entire, for the first and perhaps the last time. The man, however, disappears behind the work. Little is known of his life...
Ruisdael was not an on-the-spot painter. His landscapes are "composites," made up in the studio from sketches, memory and imagination; there is no finding the spot where Ruisdael "really" stood on the shore of the IJ. Some places he painted without seeing them at all. The Dutch market, in the late 1650s, had a vogue for Scandinavian waterfalls; Ruisdael obligingly painted about a hundred of them, undeterred by the fact that he had never been north of Holland. His Haarlempjes, or "Views of Haarlem," were also bread and butter; their usual format is one of the best-loved...