Word: raphaels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...When Raphael suddenly died in 1520 at the age of 37, his last work, the Transfiguration, was acclaimed as a masterpiece by the file of Cardinals and connoisseurs who trooped past his bier and saw the painting near by. The strong, graceful figures, the supple, continuous modeling, the ecstatic vision of a gravity-free Christ rising into the air above Mount Tabor-these struck Raphael's admirers not only as the quintessence of his style but as a climax of the entire Renaissance system of ideal figure painting...
...Napoleon's orders, the Transfiguration was taken off to the Louvre, and in 1802 it was heavily varnished for protection. The varnish gradually darkened to an ocher soup, contributing to the traditional idea that Raphael, a draftsman without peer, was a mediocre colorist. The change also raised the suspicion in some specialists' minds that the lower and darker half of the painting, depicting the cure of a boy's madness by divine grace, had actually been done by Raphael's pupil Giulio Romano...
...have given way to a deep, dazzling blue; the dead areas of tone sparkle with lost nuances of color; and the modeling of flesh has acquired a high, suave fullness that had been submerged in the murk. What stood revealed, said Redig de Campos, was "a Raphael who, in his last work, had dared to show himself comparable to the greatest colorists of the time, that is to say, the Venetians. We have been given back a new Raphael, a transfigured Transfiguration...
There were, of course, problems of assimilation. When John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) went to Italy, he also struggled to resolve them in his first European picture, an Ascension (1775), which must be one of the quaintest homages to Raphael ever made. But in the same year he met two wealthy American tourists and painted their portrait...
Stella painted gas tanks, smoke stacks, the Brooklyn Bridge. He liked to call New York City his "wife." The city keeps recurring in the exhibition; it is its only clear image and might have been the subject of a coherent but less compendious effort. Raphael Soyer has a wonderfully weighty picture of the massive foundations of the Williamsburg Bridge with little red Surprise Laundry wagons lined up at the curb ready to make deliveries. In the '30s George Grosz did a series of watercolors: a childlike view of the harbor and a lurid skyline. Piet Mondrian, who spent...