Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In other departments of painting the note of realism is naturally still more universally apparent; but as in the work of the painters of decoration it is often most noticeable as an undertone, indicating a point of departure rather than an aim. Bonvin is a realist only as Chardin, as Van der Meer of Delft, as Nicholas Maes were, before the jargon of realism had been thought of. He is, first of all, an exquisite artist, in love with the beautiful in reality, finding in it the humblest material, and expressing it with the gentlest, sweetest, æsthetic severity and composure imaginable. The most fastidious critic needs but a touch of human feeling to convert any characterization of this most refined and elevated of painters into pure panegyric. Vollon's touch is felicity itself, and it is evident that he takes more pleasure in exercising and exploiting it than in its successful imitation, striking as its imitative quality is. Gervex and Duez are very much more than impressionists, both in theory and practice. There is nothing polemic in either. Painters extol in the heartiest way the color, the creative coloration of Gervex's "Rolla," quite aside from its dramatic force or its truth of aspect. Personal feeling is clearly the inspiration of every work of Duez, not the demonstration of a theory of treating light and atmosphere. The same may be said of Roll at his best, as in his superb rendering of what may be called the modern painter's conception of the myth of Europa. Compared with Paul Veronese's admirable classic, that violates all the unities (which Veronese, nevertheless, may readily be pardoned by all but literalists and theorists for neglecting), this splendid nude girl in plein air, flecked with splotches of sunlight filtered through a sieve of leafage, with her realistic taurine companion, and their environment of veridically rendered out-of-doors, may stand for an illustrative definition of modernity; but what you feel most of all is Roll. It is ten chances to one that he has never even been to Venice or thought of Veronese. He has not always been so successful; as when in his "Work" he earned Degas's acute comment: "A crowd is made with five persons, not with fifty." ("Il y a cinquante figures, mais je ne vois pas la foule; on fait une foule avec cinq, et non pas avec cinquante.") But he has always been someone. Compare with him L'Hermitte, a painter who illustrates sometimes the possibility of being an artificial realist. His "Vintage" at the Metropolitan Museum, his "Harvesters" at the Luxembourg, are excellently real and true in detail, but in idea and general expression they might compete for the prix de Rome. The same is measurably true of Lerolle, whose pictures are more sympathetic sometimes they are very sympathetic but on the whole display less power. But in each instance the advocate
The vulgar, who see nothing of a work of art but its external side, will find it difficult to understand that the art of "La Source" and of Degas's cumbersome housewives is the same. To the vulgar, Bouguereau and not Degas is the interpreter of the classical tradition. 'Hurry, rush, fashion, are the enemies of toil, patience, and seclusion, without which no great works are produced.
Do we not find Ingres' penetrating and intense line in the thin straining limbs of Degas's ballet-girls, in the heavy shoulders of his laundresses bent over the ironing table, and in the coarse forms of his housewives who sponge themselves in tin baths?
Not having attained the scientific drawing which one finds in Degas's, they have a grace and a brilliancy which Degas's nudes have never known. If his rare portraits of men are inferior to those of his rivals, his women's portraits have a frequently superior distinction. His great modern compositions are equal to the most beautiful works by Manet and Degas.
Degas's old style of drawing undergoes modification: with the help of slight deformations, accentuations of the modelling and subtle falsifications of the proportions, managed with infinite tact and knowledge, the artist brings forth in relief the important gesture, subordinating to it all the others.
However impressive Manet's picture may be; however brilliant Monet's endeavor to reproduce sunlight may seem; however refined and elegant Degas's delicate selection of pictorial material for broad and masterful generalization, for enduing what he painted with an interest deeper than its surface and underlying its aspect, Courbet has but one rival among realistic painters.
I looked at his portraits, at his marvellous ballet-girls, at the washerwomen, and understood nothing of what I saw. My blindness to Degas's merit alarmed me not a little, and I said to Manet to whom I paid a visit in the course of the afternoon "It is very odd, Manet, I understand your work, but for the life of me I cannot see the great merit you attribute to Degas."
The writer of this book happened one day to mention Degas's name before a member of the Institute. "What!" exclaimed he, "you know him? Why didn't you speak to me about him?"
Degas has done this, not as Flandren tried to, by reproducing the externality of the master's work, but as only a man of genius could, by the application of the method to new material. Degas's early pictures, "The Spartan Youths" and "Semiramis building the Walls of Babylon". are pure Ingres. To this day Degas might be very fairly described as un petit Ingres.
The empty space on the left, so characteristic of Degas's compositions, admirably balances the composition, and it is only relieved by the stone matchbox, and the newspaper thrown across the opening between the tables. Everywhere a perspective, and these are combined with such strange art that the result is synthetic.
Word Of The Day