Word: piero
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...example among many is Woman with a Coffeepot, circa 1895. One would need to go back 400 years, to Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto, to find a painted human figure of such monumental gravity. All is volume, all is power, not only the large masses--the head that seems hewn from some skin-colored rock, the torso and the flaring blue pyramid of the skirt, the cylindrical coffeepot and the cup with the spoon set vertically in it--but also the microforms, such as the knot tying the woman's apron at her waist, which has the finality...
Forget about social history. Though any post-Marxist pedant can wring out the usual insights about patriarchy and property in 17th century Dutch bourgeois life, none of them touch on the peculiar magic of Vermeer's images. Like Piero della Francesca, Vermeer was a highly inexpressive artist. He didn't even paint a self-portrait, as far as anyone knows. You come out of the exhibit knowing almost as little about Vermeer the man as when you went in. Biography, faint: Lived in Delft, a backwater. Son of a silkworker. A Papist in a Calvinist town. Quite successful nonetheless. Married...
Lager too still aspired to make a positivist art about modern life based on classical principles. A whole range of artists, from Piero della Francesca to Manet, are implicit in his image in praise of skilled labor, The Constructors, 1950. Perhaps the show's most moving and nuanced postwar tribute to sculpture's classical past is Henri Laurens' Morning, 1944. A bronze woman awakening: it ought to be an idyllic image. But it is not, because the massive post-Cubist forms of her limbs suggest stress, a heavy, invisible load to which the energy locked in the figure responds...