KEY WORKS: Any still life. Ditto, any view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, in Cézanne’s native Provence, the mountain in art history. Ditto, any and all scenes of card players. And the portraits of his wife and himself. In general, the later a Cézanne, the bigger a deal it’s likely to be—also the more abstract. A lot of people consider Bathers (1898–1905, Philadelphia Museum of Art) the painter’s summa, but follow his example and come to it last.
Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: The other three Post-Impressionists: Seurat (the one with the thousands of little dots), Van Gogh (him you know), and Gauguin (of Brittany and Tahiti). PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Try to rise to the occasion. God knows, the critics and commentators try, labeling Picasso, among other things, “the charging bull of modern art,” “that Nietzschean monster from Málaga,” and “the walking scrotum, the inexhaustible old stud of the Côte d’Azur.” Be all that as it may, you’ve got to understand something about Cubism (which has nothing to do with actual cubes, and everything to do with seeing things in relationship to one another, simultaneously, and from more than one vantage point at a time, with the result that you may find yourself looking at a teacup, say, or a birdcage, both head on and from the air). And something about celebrity (Picasso, toward the end, enjoyed a fame no painter, not even worldlings like Raphael and Rubens, had ever known, complete with bastard heirs, sycophantic dealers, and Life magazine covers). Beyond those two basics there’s the energy, the fecundity, the frankness, the no-flies-on-me penchant for metamorphosis and the consequent welter of styles (one critic counted eighty of them, and that was back in the early Fifties), the mythologizing (watch for Minotaurs, nymphs, and river gods), and, in a personal vein, the womanizing (he was notorious for classifying his lady friends as either “goddesses” or “doormats”). You should know that Cézanne and the primitive sculpture of Africa and pre-Christian Spain were big influences and El Greco a lesser one; that the “pathetic” Blue and “wistful” Rose periods predate Cubism per se; that the appeal of collage—literally, “gluing”—was that it got scraps of modern life right inside the picture frame; that Picasso claimed to “paint forms as I think them, not as I see them” (let alone as they looked); and that the painting after 1950 (not the sculpture, however) was once judged to be lacking in intensity.
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
KEY WORKS: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), arguably the most “radical” of all paintings, and Guernica (1937, Prado), last of the great “political” paintings. Also, a sculpture; try The Guitar (1912, Museum of Modern Art), all metal sheets and empty spaces.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Georges Braque, who once commented that he and Picasso were “roped together like mountaineers,” but who wound up playing Ashley Wilkes to his friend’s Rhett Butler. For the record: Juan Gris and Fernand Léger are the two other ranking Cubists; Henri Matisse (see under “Fauvism”), the other great painter of the century; Marcel Duchamp, the alternative role model (see under “Dada”) for young—and subversive—artists; Salvador Dalí (see under “Surrealism”), the fellow Spaniard who valued publicity and the high life even more than Picasso did.
The Leonardo/Michelangelo Crib Sheet
Practical Italian for the
Gallery-Goer
Artwise, New York may have recently had a field day, but it’s Italy that had a High Renaissance. Which means that if it’s snob appeal you’re after, you’re going to have to learn to roll your rs a bit. Here’s your basic lesson.
CHIAROSCURO (kee-ahr-e-SKEWR-o): Literally means “bright-dark” in Italian and describes the technique, in painting or drawing, of modeling three-dimensional figures by contrasting or gradating areas of light and dark. Leonardo da Vinci was among the first to use chiaroscuro to break out of the tradition of flat, one-dimensional outlining of figures. One of the great achievements of the Renaissance, chiaroscuro soon became part and parcel of painting. Rembrandt is the acknowledged master of the technique; if you want a more recherché example, try Caravaggio.
Chiaroscuro: Caravaggio’s The Musicians
CONTRAPPOSTO (kohn-tra-POH-stoe): In sculptures of the human form, the pose in which the upper body faces in a slightly different direction from the lower, with the weight resting on one leg. Contrapposto was originally the Greeks’ solution to the problem of balancing the weight of the body in sculpture. The earlier formula had been the frontal, static pose, in which the legs were treated like two columns with the torso set squarely on top of them and the head balancing on top of that. The Greeks, rightly, found this boring and stupid. Renaissance sculptors revived the Greek formula, renamed it, and added dynamic tension by making the placement of body parts more extreme and contrasting. This may seem like picky technical stuff to you, but it was a watershed in the history of art. Contrapposto is all over the place in Renaissance sculpture, but the example you can’t get away with ignoring is Michelangelo’s David.
Contrapposto: Cristofano da Bracciano’s Orpheus
FRESCO: This was the method for painting indoor murals, from the days of the Minoan civilization in Crete right up to the seventeenth century. It involves brushing water-based pigments onto fresh, moist lime plaster (fresco means “fresh” in Italian), so that the pigment is absorbed by the plaster as it dries and becomes part of the wall. Fresco painting reached its peak during the Renaissance, when artists had the backing—and the backup crews—to allow them to undertake the kind of monumental works the technique is best suited to. Today, it’s also referred to as “buon fresco” or “true fresco,” to distinguish it from “secco” or “mezzo” fresco, a later method of painting on dry plaster that allowed artists to get similar results with less trouble. Frescoes abound in European art history, but some of the most famous are Michelangelo’s, in the Sistine Chapel; Raphael’s, in the Stanza della Segnatura and the Loggia of the Vatican; and Giotto’s, at the Arena Chapel in Padua. During the 1930s and 1940s, the WPA Federal Arts Project commissioned a couple thousand frescoes, mostly for municipal buildings and mostly forgettable.