Word: painters
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...Winslow Homer the greatest American painter of the 19th century? Around 1900, many Americans would have said yes. The reputation of Thomas Eakins stood nowhere near its present zenith, and there was something flashy and slightly suspicious about John Singer Sargent, the other main candidate. And Homer was not only big with the public; he exerted a huge influence on younger painters. Robert Henri and the other realists of the Ashcan School embraced him as a role model--the virile eye, always staring at reality over the pencil. "The big strong thing," said Henri, thinking of Homer's seascapes...
...Homer retrospective that was seen in past months at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it's that Homer was not just a fine American painter but one of the great realist artists of the 19th century as a whole, comparable in achievement to Manet or Courbet, if not Degas. The show's curators, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, have brought enormous scholarly energy to arguing this on the walls, winnowing Homer...
Nevertheless, he painted his first masterpiece in 1869-70, a portrait of his fellow painter from Aix, Achille Emperaire, with his dwarf's body and weak mantis limbs, enthroned--there is no other word for its weirdly authoritarian effect--in a high-backed chair upholstered in floral chintz. Painted darkly in homage to Manet and preceded by some of the most beautiful head studies in Cezanne's early work, it depicts the stunted Emperaire as a parody king, an "emperor," but with compassion; no mere caricatural impulse could account for the averted gaze and the great, sad, liquid eyes...
...structure, like reefs and rocks beneath a smiling sea, and that was what Cezanne sought and obsessively analyzed--the bones and masses of the world. His famous remark about seeking in nature "the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" need not be taken literally--he was never a geometric painter, still less an abstract one, though later abstractionists would build on his work. And yet his greatest paintings bear abstract constructions of tremendous amplitude and sureness...
...stock nudes gathered around what must have been a picnic basket is as resolutely antisensuous as an assembly of naked women could possibly be. Some of them look like seals stranded on rocks. Others are lumpish giantesses. None were painted from actual models because, as his friend the painter Emile Bernard recalled, "he was the slave of an extreme sense of decorum, and...this slavery had two causes: the one, that he didn't trust himself with women; the other, that he had religious scruples and a genuine feeling that such things could not be done in a small provincial...