bouncing pearls, white skin, flashing colour — a quick brutality.
Shimmers of lightning bathing the silks and satins. This elegance, cheek by jowl with ugly rape, her hand reaching out to you, for you to rescue her. The peasant-like face of Tarquin clashes with a sprawling statue emblematic of culture all before a bejewelled wall.
Peter Schjeldahl in the February 12, 2007, edition of the New Yorker said:
He drew with his brush, light over dark — so that shadings came first, imparting a sumptuous density to forms that are lit with highlights like spatters of sun.
Baroque which took hold two decades later with Caravaggio, can seem an edited ratification of tendencies already developed by Tintoretto.
A Venetian master best seen in Venice, Tintoretto grows on you, his slashing style symphonic.
Titian, king of Venetian painting, just hated Tintoretto. Competition!
JP
26. Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando) (1887–88)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando), 1887–88
Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 161.3 cm
Joseph Winterbotham Collection (1925.523)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Jean Sutherland Boggs in the Expo 67 catalogue captures the message of Lautrec aptly:
The whole work of Lautrec could be interpreted as a record of man at play — in cafés, cabarets, brothels, the opera house, at the races or, as here, in the circus. It is however, a play which tends to be vicarious, passed on to spectators as apathetic as these. It is also a play which demands hard work of the performers even of the solid horse in the painting. Lautrec inevitably cut through the illusion of such a performance to reveal something as sordid and cruel as the circus master’s sadistic pleasure in his whip. Yet always surmounting this caustic vision of man wearyingly at play for the second hand enjoyment of others is a respect for man’s vitality and will.
The circus master may be wicked (look at his caricatured profile) but he is also dynamic and self-assertive. The bareback rider may be tawdry but she and the horse move with considerable conviction through space. They may have vices but among them are not maudlin self-pity nor the vacant apathy of the meagre crowd. Lautrec’s poster-like forms have this same aggressive force. It was this combination of irresistible will and energy that Lautrec found most admirable in performers giving their audience an illusion of man at play.4
After years of contemplating Lautrec, for me, Boggs has captured his special message. Critics can really guide you.
Lautrec, a dwarf, brilliant, astute, always fighting pain and illness, led a peripatetic life among Parisian music halls and brothels. Some of the early purchasers of his art were brothels. Brothels bought and sold. Here Gimpel tells of a sale:
May 18, 1918
George Bernheim told me: “In a little while, at six, I’m going to the brothel on rue Favart to see sixteen Toulouse-Lautrecs for which they’re asking 100,000 francs. They’d have turned down 120,000 before the war.”
“Quite possibly,” countered Alforsen, a Swedish artist, “as business is bad in the houses….”5
Lautrec painted the underside of Paris, its brothels and dancehalls. There is sometimes frenetic energy, other times a fatigued despondency. But never boring, nor do you react with pity. It is a tough life, but true.
Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish (1837–38)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish, 1837–38
Oil on canvas, 174.5 x 224.9 cm
Mr. and Mrs. W.W. Kimball Collection (1922.4472)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Turner existed only to paint. He started at age eleven and didn’t stop until his death in 1851. He was cockney and a prodigious worker. Landscape was his friend. Everywhere he went, he took his notebooks. He mastered watercolour.
This 1837 painting is a grand sweeping stage. He had a passion for the sea. He has caught the fury and the wet of the sea. Here the boat may be out of control, in the frothing, giddy power of the waves. There is a vibrant novelty to these waves with their ginger-ale fizz and drag current. Was ever the roil of the sea caught better? The spinnaker pushed by a hell-bent gust, driving the boat to a surge. How can the hucksters get close? A desperate painting with, off in the distance, a new-fangled steamer. The future? The waves, a pattern of spun gold, the sky over brutish black and an ochre lump, all airy blue, buttery yellow atmosphere and light, the colour becoming the story — painting set free, reflecting the vicissitudes of nature. He applied his watercolours wet on wet, allowing paint to diffuse and outlines to soften, influencing his oil painting. This is at first a traditional painting but, at a closer look, changes are afoot.
Turner and Constable were opposites. The promiscuous Turner railed against marriage; Constable pious, devoted in marriage, conventional.
Constable said of Turner when they met in 1813, “I was a good deal entertained with Turner. I always expected to find him what I did — he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.”
This painting was done only seven years before his more abstract later works such as Rain, Steam and Speed.
JP
27. The Bedroom (1889)
Vincent van Gogh (1853–90)
Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889
Oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.3 cm
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.417)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Van Gogh, meteoric in his late-blooming passion as an artist, disturbed, driven, his prodigious talent is measured in mere months. He produced his masterworks in only thirty months.
In October 1888 he painted a picture of his bedroom, a novel subject for a painting.
He produced two more paintings of his bedroom in Arles. The first, damaged by water, is in Amsterdam. This, his second, was meant as a sort of reproduction. The description that follows has a slight variance from the painting here. It modifies the first painting. But except
