Word: pompiers
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...Modernism was not only a vehicle for political protest or idealist reverie. It also became, for the first time, chic: it entered the salons and diffused through the decorative arts, especially in France. And it turned pompier, as in the morbid and overblown paintings of society artist Tamara de Lempicka. The birth of Art Deco is one of the themes of this show -- designers' homages to larger avant-garde ideas: a Cubist table lamp, for instance, or "skyscraper" furniture...
...dying November, the work of grooming the "elephant" for its last incarnation drew to an end. Masons were finishing the limestone slabs on its wide steps up from the Quai Anatole France. On the parapet, a crane solicitously set down an allegorical bronze of Oceania by some 19th century pompier -- a colonial damsel with thick lips, melon breasts and a Tahitian war club, flanked by a kangaroo...
...aspect of Orsay's collection that is likely to be controversial -- though not with the general public, which is sure to love it -- is the amount of space given to so-called pompier art of the Third Empire. (Pompier means "fireman," and the allusion is to the heroic nudes with Greek helmets, resembling the casques of the Paris fire brigade, that infested beaux arts academic painting.) Cachin and her colleagues have dredged up an astounding panoply of period kitsch, from 1850s imitators of Ingres through Bouguereau to what must be the most obsessively pederastic elocution in all art history, Jean...
...museums; today the reverse. It is inconceivable that the marginality and hamfistedness of most of what passes for major painting at the end of the 20th century could have been taken seriously in the Paris of Degas, Cezanne and Rodin. Under the heat of the market, avant-garde and pompier have simply fused into an opaque, complacent lump. Only in the museum, it seems, can the full evidence of creativity be reconstituted. If we are to enter the world of our great-grandparents and discover why their values in art, for better and worse, were so much more intense than...
Their work, after all, was precisely what the founders of modern art - Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Matisse " - had set themselves against: | pompier realism, with its gleaners, nuns and goosegirls, its moralizing illusionism, heavy sentiment and lentil-soup colors. It was "photo graphic" - a single word, damnation enough. But in 1 98 1 taste in such matters has not merely shifted, it has come full circle. The exhibition now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900," would not even have been attempted by an American museum 15 years ago; the subject...