Word: poussins
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...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...
...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...
...wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West...
...zanne, in a phrase that spoke volumes about the classical ambitions of early modern art, said that he wanted to do Poussin over again from nature. Welliver's ambition, at least in part, is to do the same with Pollock. Such landscapes are "allover" paintings, slices taken from a boundless field of pictorial incident. The apparent disorder of the view, that energetic chaos of sticks and rocks, is formalist to the last square inch...