pseudoclassicism

Updated: May 12, 2025

It is because his art is so old that it was "too new" for even Corot to understand it; because he harked back beyond the pseudoclassicism of his time to the great art of the past, and was classic as Phidias and Giotto and Michelangelo were classic, that he seemed strange to his contemporaries. In everything he was conservative. He hated change; he wanted things to remain as they had always been.

Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public: And Other Essays On Art Subjects