Word: watteau
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...name Johannes Vermeer now carries a vast aura of desirability and sweetness. It has become one of the most beloved way points of art history, like Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca or Watteau. Nothing, it seems, is going to change that, but it wasn't always so. Vermeer's reputation is almost wholly posthumous. One of the reasons why he is so admired and his pictures are so unattainable a goal for collectors is precisely the cause of his obscurity in the 19th century: the rarity of his work...
...Florine Stettheimer's work. It is besotted with style as an end in itself, and its delight in quotation naturally endears it to postmodernist taste. Sometimes it's tea-party Ensor, without the bilious satire; sometimes it's Rus sian ballet. There are traces of Elie Nadelman, Odilon Redon, Watteau, Hieronymus Bosch and an over-the-top capriccio of swimmers in some celestial spa titled Natatorium Undine, 1927. Her painting of a spring sale at Henri Bendel's, with ladies squabbling over the merchandise like angry hummingbirds, resembles a Pompeian grotesque translated into the 1920s. She liked caricature...
...with cherubic angels and sparkling applications of paint, is a far cry from the violent and dramatic Prometheus. Illustrating an open-air party of fleshy, amorous aristocrats dressed in satin, Garden of Love is an obvious precursor of the eighteenth-century fete-champetre popularized by Rococco artists such as Watteau...
When you look at a Watteau fete champetre, an Impressionist boating party or certain Matisses, you are seeing the long-range results of Titian's and Giorgione's invention of the pastoral mode in art: the landscape of pleasure, the earthly paradise derived from Latin literature, with its shepherds, gallants and nymphs. The picture that starts this long train is Titian's Concert Champetre, circa 1509, which is one of the most hermetic and disputed images in all Western art. It gets about 27 columns of dense text in the catalog, chewing over its literary sources, the presence...
...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...