Word: sardanapalus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wear two hats," Laclotte recalls, "and sometimes it gave me a headache." For the Louvre is by nature a monopoly, with the gravitational pull of a black hole. So many of the canonical masterpieces of the 19th century -- Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and his Death of Sardanapalus, Courbet's The Studio and Funeral at Ornans and so on, ad infinitum -- are in the Louvre that Laclotte was faced with appalling difficulties in getting anything to cross the Seine to Orsay. Moreover, since he was only on loan to Orsay, he wanted to go back to an undepleted Louvre when...
...paint huge allegories of human fate. One sees this interest already in Brittany paintings like Woman in the Hay, an image drenched in anonymous sexuality, whose half-nude peasant woman sprawled on the hay is quoted directly from one of the female slaves in Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. These early modernists were not, after all, deeply concerned with the future, as the avant-garde would be 30 years later. They saw themselves as prophets but obsessed, as prophets often are, with a past they wanted art to recover: a way of visual speech that was archaic, direct...