Rococo
Fragonard’s Merry Company
New York Review of Books
Colin B. Bailey writes about Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures recently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bailey writes that the show “[celebrates] the thirty-seven-year-old Fragonard as a practitioner of ‘pure painting’—an action painter avant la lettre. His rainbow palette is ‘parrot colored’—to use a term that was applied to Renoir in the heyday of […]
Watteau’s Eloquent Formalism
Painting Perceptions
John Goodrich visits Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection and shares his observations about Watteau’s striking formalism. Goodrich writes: “Superficially, Watteau is all fanciful froth – charming subject matter, feathery modeling, a light, darting touch. But what distinguishes Watteau are his extraordinary and comprehensive intuitions about formal rhythms — in this case, […]
Watteau’s Art of War
New York Sun Arts
Xico Greenwald reviews Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France at The Frick Collection, New York, on view through October 2, 2016. Greenwald writes: “The paintings gathered here might have been integral to Watteau’s artistic development. Perhaps these early experiments composing figures outdoors sparked the idea for fête galante scenes, with wounded soldiers […]
Watteau’s Soldiers @ the Frick Collection
In Watteau’s world, more than in any other painter’s, figure to canvas is as actor to stage.