From August 20, 2011 to May 13, 2012 – Museum of Fine Arts Boston
European art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is dominated by two powerful artistic movements: Neo-classicism and Romanticism. Neo-Classicism is marked by purity, austerity, clarity, and an almost abstract obsession with the linear. The style was stimulated by the recent archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum and by pageants and festivals of the French Revolution that referred back to Republican Rome. By contrast, Romanticism was an art of extremes, of melodrama: the dramatic interplay of light and shadow rather than linear purity. Romantic artists believed in nature—whether wild landscape, wild beasts, or the animal impulses of humankind—as an uncontrollable force, inspiring awe and terror. “Passion and Precision in the Age of Revolution” features about forty-five works by artists including Ingres, Delacroix, Desprez, Prud’hon, Turner, Blake, Gericault, Girodet, Flaxman, and Schinkel.
Tag: neo classicism
Passion and Precision in the Age of Revolution – Boston – MA
David to Cézanne, Master Drawings – Sidney – Australia
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Pierre Baillot 1829
From the 22nd of September to the 5th of December 2010 – Art Gallery of New South Wales – Sydney
David to Cézanne, Master drawings from the Prat Collection, Paris
This exhibition of 100 drawings offers an in-depth exploration of the development of French art over the course of the 19th century.
The defining movements of neo-classicism, Romanticism, realism and Impressionism are represented through works of outstanding quality by the greatest French draughtsmen: Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Moreau, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne. The selection also represents a number of artists whose work, though less well-known, is often surprising for its inspiration and originality.
The exhibition comprises landscapes, portraits, figure and composition studies, meticulously finished drawings and quick sketches, all bearing witness to the vitality and richness of the French school of drawing.
This is the first time that the collection has been seen in Australia, offering a rare opportunity to see some of the most beautiful examples of 19th-century drawing and provides an insight into the fascinating world of the collector.;
The collection is, according to Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Louvre:
“a top-rank ensemble … [striking for the] invariably perfect quality of each drawing … Rarely has there been such a manifest, coherent determination to conceive a collection as a creation; in isolation each sheet delights and enchants; all together these drawings … are a lesson in the history of art, a non-verbal lesson, and all the more enjoyable for that …”