|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Show like No Other: Masterpieces of the Barnes Foundation
| Article
# : |
10155 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
2,399 Words |
| Author
: |
Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
For a number of reasons, Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Early Modern, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through August 15, is an exhibition like no other.
First, the quality of the pictures on view is truly extraordinary--included are some of the greatest efforts of artists such as Matisse, Cezanne, Seurat, van Gogh, Manet, and Renoir.
Take, for example, the paintings by Matisse. Among the works acquired by Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes (1872-1951), the doctor-chemist who assembled this collection, is The Joy of Life, the 1905 painting that definitively liberated the artist from his Post-Impressionist debts to Paul Signac, sending him--and the rest of twentieth-century art--on the path of pure color freed from dependence on nature. Barnes also acquired Seated Riffian (1912-13), a monumental, dazzling painting of a North African male from Matisse's Moroccan period, and The Music Lesson (1917), a more sensuous and psychologically charged treatment of the theme than its pendant, the 1916 Piano Lesson that now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. And perhaps most famously, there is the celebrated Dance mural, commissioned by Barnes for the foundation's building and done twice by Matisse--the second time when he discovered the measurements he was working with in his Nice studio were incorrect. It was this project that led Matisse to invent his technique of working with gouache-covered pasted papers, a development that in turn was to determine the final two decades of his career.
Of Cezanne's works, Barnes managed to acquire the greatest of the Card Players paintings Cezanne did toward the end of his life; the fascinating, monumental, and transitional Bathers at Rest (1875-76); and a portrait of his wife, Woman in a Green Hat (1894-95), in which the artist manages to cast his aesthetic ambitions in an example of classical stasis and "gravitas."
Among other highlights in the collection (and this exhibition) are Seurat's enigmatic and sensuous Models, a painting of three nudes in his studio with a portion of the completed Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte visible behind them, and van Gogh's portrait of his friend the postman Roulin.
"Eccentric" is one of the many pejoratives frequently used to describe Dr. Barnes. Yet it is hard to imagine a true eccentric having the clarity of mind and acumen to assemble a collection of this caliber.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
