Word: watteau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...each generation has to reinvent the past: to construct its own Watteau, even its own Leonardo. The new outlines never quite coincide with the old. This is true of modern art, too, which itself has become old; and it even applies to impressionism, the most accessible, popular modern movement of all. Sometimes later styles "reinterpret" earlier ones, as abstract expressionism fostered the present veneration of the late works of Monet...