Word: watteau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years in America have been the golden age of the museum retrospective, bringing a series of great and (for this generation of museums and their public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of scholarship and curatorial skill: late and early Cezanne, Picasso, Manet, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Velazquez, Poussin, up to MOMA's current show of Picasso's and Braque's Cubist years and, perhaps, Seurat to come...
...PASTORAL LANDSCAPE, National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, Washington. In this joint venture, the National offers "The Legacy of Venice," two centuries of painting from Giorgione (a progenitor of the pastoral genre) to Watteau, while the Phillips, in "The Modern Vision," carries the theme from Constable down to Matisse. Through...
Artists, often quite dissimilar ones, share common sources. The themes of pastoral delight, installed in Venetian art by Giorgione (represented here with one rare, very rubbed drawing) and given monumental form by Titian, spread south and north through the influence of the Giorgionesque engravers Giulio and Domenico Campagnola. Watteau copies one Campagnola landscape; Rubens takes a motif from another, Rembrandt from a third. These hard, wiry- lined little engravings, with their slightly metallic nudes and sudden dark explosions of vegetation, are to the circulation of ideas about landscape what Marcantonio Raimondi's copies after Raphael are to the human figure...
...often observed -- first about Giorgione, and so on through to the 18th century -- that the pastoral mode was harder to decipher than religious or historical painting. There is not much narrative precision in Watteau's fetes galantes: these little societies of the elect, privileged folk in their shining taffetas are not exactly allegories; they are elaborations of mood, in which every pleat of fabric on a woman's turned back seems to carry its aura of psychological subtlety. And in Giorgione's Tempest, to this day no one really knows what the nude woman, young soldier and lightning flash...
...Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet, 1902, whose music is joined by the howling of a giant white poodle, is a reprise of innumerable earlier pastorals. Gauguin was partly a reprise of Watteau, each in his own way imagining fugitive pleasure on a distant island, Cythera equaling Tahiti...