Word: watteau
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...Picasso's shows no sign of doing, for another 200 years. First there were his ex-students, Anthony Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens. Even more important were the French Rubénistes. "From the moment I received it, I have not had a moment's repose," Antoine Watteau wrote to his patron Julienne after he had been given a picture by Rubens, "and my eyes are never weary of returning toward the easel where I have placed it as if in a shrine...
...paint the figure, Gris resorted to its most masklike aspect: that of Pierrot, whose sad face and bright costume were among Picasso's favorite motifs too. But when Picasso dealt with clowns and circus performers, there was a pathos behind the image that extended back to Watteau. The Picassos also refer to the late 19th century vision of the artist as an exalted clown and are tinged with autobiography. In Gris, it is solely the interlocking shapes, checkerboard lozenge cloth and elliptical buttons that count...
...never able (or, for that matter, inclined) to raise his art to that Mozartian pitch of psychological tension at which Watteau's lovers and courtiers exist. Boucher, unlike Watteau, had no vision of a fragile society whose pleasures, no matter how refined, are menaced by time. Boucher painted pleasure as though it were a perpetual state, coquetry without end, threatened by neither satiety nor boredom. The elements that constitute his afternoon kingdom take on a preternatural luxury as objects; the sky, swarming with clouds of putti and looping swags of fabric, itself acquires the crisp sheen of taffeta...
...high art, without displaying any awareness of their patrician Doppelgängers. The Isle of Jazz in Music Land (1946) is a brassy plebeian version of an almost archetypal image that in fine art reveals itself in Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead and Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera: an island as kingdom of mood...
...Little Nell does to Dickens'. At this early stage one can see, especially in the Rose Period, that urge toward nostalgic generalization that repeatedly crept into Picasso's art in later years. The circus performers in Family of Saltimbanques (8) are conceived in the manner of a Watteau fête champêtre, and Picasso apparently tried to rival the psychological tension of glance and gesture in that master's work; their fragile simplicity is idealized; it is a bruised, poor Arcadia, but Arcadia still, inhabited by a species of post-industrial Noble Savage...