Word: titian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Goya he wasn't, nor a Velazquez, nor a Titian. An American Picasso, maybe? No: the oeuvre lacks that vast span. For someone who had the impact on international art that he did, Pollock had a bafflingly short career. He didn't attain any degree of originality until after his 30th birthday. The arc of the career rises from 1943, when the collector and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim commissioned him to paint a mural for her Manhattan apartment, to the early '50s--no more than 10 years. The final four years of his life brought a string of pictorial failures...
...20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work, at least in reproduction--was in the tens...
Because Lotto was away from Venice in the first 20 years of the 16th century, he missed the "painterly" pictorial revolution that was going on there, which is why his work can look a bit liny and (relatively) old-fashioned, closer to Giovanni Bellini than to young Titian. Drawing creates more of his pictorial structure than color does; yet he was a marvelous colorist, suave, moody at times, and capable of a mysterious lyricism that reminds you of Giorgione, his senior by only a few years. Except that the color goes to extremes: icing-green, purple, sky blue and orange...
...easy to forge a career in the same city, at the same time, as a man of Titian's stature. Titian used up all the air in the room; you couldn't compete with him. But Lotto wasn't trying to be Titian (which was just as well), and this, in the stacked deck of hierarchical opinion, which didn't take account of the fact that different artists had different aims and temperaments, told against his reputation. After he died, it went into decline. Lotto didn't drop out of sight, like Vermeer, and have to be completely rediscovered...
...talking hobby here. We're talking a love of art, a contempt for law enforcement and the thrill of the score. As for the Gardner heist: "You can believe I didn't plan the thing, or The Rape of Europa would have been the first to go." The Titian work was the most valuable piece in the museum but was passed over for lesser goods, Connor says with disgust...