Word: rodins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diametric opposite, Thomas Couture's pedantic warning to the Third Empire, The Romans of the Decadence, ancestor of all Cecil B. DeMille orgies. In the distance, on a raised loft that stood where the trains once came in and out, was a grimy white gleam: the spectral plaster of Rodin's Gates of Hell. In a side gallery, a visitor furtively ran his finger over the marble nipple of a luscious demimondaine writhing naked among stone roses, once the sensation of the salon of 1847, whose model had been apostrophized by Baudelaire...
...million visitors annually to gaze at its superb Cezannes, Monets, Renoirs, Van Goghs and Lautrecs. There was a residue of 19th century work from Paris' former Musee National d'Art Moderne, whose 20th century collections had already been siphoned off into the Centre Pompidou. Major sculptures, including Rodin's original plasters, came from the Rodin museum in Paris; others were recovered from obscurity in warehouses where they had languished unseen since before World War II. Versailles, Fontainebleau, the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Museum of Ceramics at Sevres surrendered their treasures. Bequests given long ago to the state...
...hundred years ago you had brilliant painters and dumb 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...
...Auguste Rodin called John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) the "Van Dyck of our times." Sargent was the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid obsessive court to both. He could make old money look dashing and paint the newest cotton-reel magnate as though he were descended from Bayard. Sixty years after his death, his "paughtraits" (as Sargent, who kept swearing he would give them up but never did, disparagingly called them) provoke unabashed nostalgia. In his Belle Epoque sirens, in the mild, arrogant masks of his Edwardian gentry, are preserved...
...public works in marble and bronze, mainly based on the human figure, stood, sat and (especially) reclined on their plinths in cities from London to Chicago, from Melbourne to New York. No other major artist in the past century, not even Auguste Rodin, completed as many public commissions as Moore. At the height of his fame, from 1960 onward, it seemed that every mayor, museum director and chairman of the board in the Western world had simultaneously agreed that a Moore work was the only possible solution to the problem of how to relieve the hardness and social tension...