Word: poussins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Again, the problem seems one of will, of whether or not one decides to seize time for one's advantage or to adopt the sinister equation that "Time is money." In A Question of Upbringing, Anthony Powell was struck by Poussin's painting of the dancing figures of Time who were "unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance." Today the dance has grown frenetic beyond measure. Yet everything hinges on the "perhaps"; in the world of punctuality and appointments, one may not be able to control ( all of time or even much...
...formal art education began in Paris in the early '20s. Balthus shied away from politico-aesthetic groups like the surrealists. After such a childhood, who needed the insecurities of the avantgarde? Instead he settled down to study the fathers: Poussin and Courbet in France and, supreme among the Italians, Piero della Francesca. The clarity and density of Piero's figures, their presence as signs in geometrically ordered space-that was what impressed Balthus. He also made designs for the stage, which in turn influenced his painting. Theater-plus-Piero gave the cues to The Street, 1933, an exceedingly...
...side of Balthus not predicted by The Street was suggested, in 1937, by The Mountain. This enormous scene of young hikers in the Bernese Oberland holds so many references-from Courbet, Caspar David Friedrich and Poussin, for starters-that it approaches pastiche. It creaks with the ambition to be a masterpiece and is regularly taken for one, though its composition has the spottily grand look of an academic mistake. But the figure of Balthus's blond wife, hands stretched above her head, rising from the dark plateau into the zone of early-morning sun, is a prime lyric invention...
...that first transfixed its audience in the preparatory paintings for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon three generations before. No exhibition in memory has been so full of eyes (or of anuses and genitals, his other fetish objects). The late work attacks and reattacks art-history themes, figures by Rembrandt, Poussin, Manet, Delacroix, Rousseau. It is culturally saturated, as well as drenched in his macaronic, theatrical and self-mocking sexuality. And yet its obsessive project is to so generalize the image of the figure as to remove it from the sphere of "culture." Picasso hardly ever used models; every figure comes...
...such problems crimped the style of American painters or sent them, like Benjamin West (the Pennsylvania prodigy who became the second president of the Royal Academy) into European careers. Often the homespun Doric is better than the mail-order Ionic. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was no Poussin, but his groups of flatboatmen and river traders, leaning on crates with the air of Arcadian shepherds on a ruin whilst floating through the delicate silver haze of the Missouri, are often genuinely classical in their construction and repose...