Mainstreams of Modern Art [antikvár]

Ingres: The Bather of Valpingon On the principle that anyone beginning a trip should have a generál idea of the route he is to take, the following fifteen paintings are offered as an introduction to this book. They are waystops, and they reappear in the body of the text. As the nineteenth century opened, painting was dominated by Francé (as it continued to be), and French painting was dominated by the classicists. As an adjunct to the political idealism of the French Revolution in its first days, classicism in painting was dedicated to a revival of the intellectual purity and the morál force of ancient Greece and Romé as they were currently imagined by philosophers and aestheticians. Rut before long, classicism degenerated into a fetterinl code of arbitrary rules and standards. By the middle of the century the demigod of the school was a pedantic tyrant and a great artist named Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who mercilessly dictated these sterile recipes, yet rose above them in his own art. His The Bather of Valpingon observes the rules in its precision, its enamellike surface, its carefully controlled drawing, its limitation of color within sharply defined boundaries. But in spirit the picture is sensuous beneath its careful surface. Ingres was a classicist by habitual conviction, but by the evidence of his work he had more in common than he realized with the warmth and sentiment of the men who were in revolt against his dogma - the romantics. (Louvre, Paris. Reproduction courtesy Phaidon Press, Ltd.)