Word: poussins
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...construction process. But it could also be very surprising, and in its insistent reduction of the human form to mechanics, extremely weird--particularly when Leger's obsession with modernity coexisted with a sense of form and construction that went straight back to those archetypal figures of French classicism, Nicolas Poussin in the 17th century and Jacques-Louis David in the 18th. And what a draftsman Leger turns out to have been! Some of the drawings in this show are among the finest of the 20th century, and this too will come as a surprise...
...that this Picasso, who after all did do something pretty great--cubism--immediately afterward begins to do something which many people would normally feel is not really great: namely a whole career as a pasticheur. So after cubism he becomes this super imitator of Ingres, Corot, Renoir, Poussin...
...would be easy in these prurient days to think of Darger merely as a compulsive old pervert--a sort of Poussin of pedophilia. (One art-historian-cum-psychiatrist opined in the New York Times that "psychologically, Darger was undoubtedly a serial killer," a wildly irresponsible judgment, since practically nothing is known about his character, and in any case, he never harmed a fly; much the same--and on the same evidence--could be said about the authors of the Old Testament...
...anxiety is never far away; it breaks through time and again. It is the Thanatos to the Eros of Cezanne's Provencalism. The summation of both--along with his deep relation to his own pictorial gods, such as Poussin--is in the paintings of bathers that Cezanne worked on in the last decade of his life...
...official Corot is generally a bore. The nymphs, shepherds and Sileni who decorate the big classical landscapes of his middle years are inert and stereotyped. He didn't have the temperament for the sensuousness Poussin put in his classical scenes; Corot's nymphs are just studio models. In Bacchante with a Panther, 1860, the girl teasing the big cat with what appears to be a dead starling looks like Mlle. Goosepimple, thanks to the gray French skies above and the damp earth under her bottom...