Word: watteau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Washington, the glowing, meticulous paintings of Watteau...
Some exhibitions seem to be beyond full criticism. They redefine their subject, the image of an artist, for a generation, and do it with the utmost sympathy and scholarly passion. The presentation of paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau that opened last month at the National Gallery in Washington, and will be seen (with various additions and subtractions) at the Grand Palais in Paris during the winter and in Berlin through the spring of 1985, is such an event. So much of the work is fragile, and loans are so difficult to negotiate, that this is the first major international...
...curators, Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre Rosenberg, with the help of Nicole Parmantier and other art historians, have condensed the existing scholarship on Watteau, together with a great deal of their own, into a catalogue that now becomes a standard work. It shows no trace of the puffy garnish of superlatives considered obligatory for blockbuster shows in U.S. museums. The authors discriminate severely: "The execution lacks energy and seems pasty," runs the note on one painting from the Hermitage in Leningrad. "The figures are unsteady, the faces have no character or charm...
There are only about 60 Watteau paintings on whose authenticity all experts agree, and his life is obscure. Since the Renaissance there have been few great artists about whom less is known than Watteau. He is almost as much of an enigma as Vermeer. He was born in Valenciennes in 1684, the son of a Flemish roof tiler. Until a few years before, Valenciennes was part of Flanders, not France; and Watteau's Flemish origins may have had more than a casual meaning to him, since the main influence on his work was Rubens. Nothing is known about...
Through them we are made privy to the sight of Rubens inventing half a dozen variations on a given arm until the right one clicks; to that of Watteau, infatuated with the silky passage of red chalk over paper, building up his stock of memory images and usable prototypes for later consumption. Looking at drawings seems an even more private affair than studying paintings. Drawings never lie about skill...