Word: painterly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
This predisposition made him a great painter of the nude, though undoubtedly a phallocratic one. One sees him at full stretch in Sleep, the painting of two life-size lesbians entwined on a bed. It proves the impossibility of distinguishing, at a certain level, between pornography and art. The painting has little to do with lesbian perceptions of sex: it is a seraglio scene, an enactment for men's eyes only. But despite the corniness of the flowers and pearls that allegorize Luxury, the creamy rose of those bodies, shadowed with olive and held within the complicated machinery...
...with foam as solidly as a steak with fat, reappear on the other side of the Atlantic in Winslow Homer's seapieces at Prout's Neck in Maine. Picasso would do versions of the sleeping girls on the banks of the Seine. In fact, Courbet has always been a painter's painter, because the scope of his appetite could show others how not to be afraid of their own vulgarity. His career reminds us that great and idiotic artists have something in common -- both are shameless...