Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I suppose 'kitsch' is to visual art what 'cheese' is to music. I have a high cheese tolerance with music, and perhaps with art too. Thirdform, e.g., has no taste for cheese whatsoever.

I have a degree of appreciation for Watteau, for example, who is highly kitschy

1024px-Antoine_Watteau_-_L%27imbarco_per_Citera.jpg


But I don't like Bouguereau, who is supremely kitschy

310px-William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_%281825-1905%29_-_The_Birth_of_Venus_%281879%29.jpg
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
My taste is very pliable, which I often consider a flaw -

So for example I instinctively felt nauseated by rococo art but I was aware that people with much more knowledge and taste than me rated it, so I read and listened to what they said about it and I grew to appreciate some of it.

But then I can get into... I dunno, Goya or something, and suddenly rococo looks disgustingly sentimental and mannered to me.

But I'm not really sure if either version of my taste is "right".
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
But I don't like Bouguereau, who is supremely kitschy

310px-William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_%281825-1905%29_-_The_Birth_of_Venus_%281879%29.jpg

Although interestingly what i dislike about bouguereau is the high degree of technical polish he brings to these ideal scenes, the way he renders them photographically - which makes them somehow disgusting, that collision of reality and unreality.

Whereas Boticelli's Venus is obviously a fantasy, a pure product of the imagination.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's scarier now cos he's not responded

He knows what I'm like

Playing on my anxiety like a fiddle the fucker
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
DT50.jpg


The Repast of the Lion,ca. 1907
Henri Rousseau (le Douanier)

This work was probably shown in the Salon d'Automne of 1907, but it treats a theme that Rousseau first explored in Surprised! of 1891 (National Gallery, London). He based the exotic vegetation of his many jungle pictures on studies that he made in Paris’s botanical gardens, and adapted the wild beasts from popular ethnographic journals and illustrated children's books. Rousseau’s nickname, "le Douanier," derives from his job as a customs official.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I really like Rousseau.

Rousseau-Hungry-Lion.jpg


Rousseau claimed he had "no teacher other than nature",[3] although he admitted he had received "some advice" from two established Academic painters, Félix Auguste Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme.[17] Essentially, he was self-taught and is considered to be a naïve or primitive painter.

His best-known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrations in children's books[18] and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of taxidermy wild animals. During his term of service, he had also met soldiers who had survived the French expedition to Mexico, and he listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Particularly like the fact that he never painted from nature. He just imagined things, like we all used to when we were chiddlers.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Kitsch or not this is crazy mad skillz painting

DT717.jpg


Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn (1825–1860), Princesse de Broglie,1851–53
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres French


Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the neo-classical French artist par excellence, painted this masterpiece toward the end of his life when his reputation as a portraitist to prominent citizens and Orléanist aristocrats had been long established. Pauline de Broglie sat for the artist’s final commission. Ingres captures the shy reserve of his subject while illuminating through seamless brushwork the material quality of her many fine attributes: her rich blue satin and lace ball gown, the gold embroidered shawl, and silk damask chair, together with finely tooled jewels of pearl, enamel, and gold. The portrait was commissioned by the sitter’s husband, Albert de Broglie, a few years after their ill-fated marriage. Pauline was stricken with tuberculosis soon after completion of the exquisite portrait, leaving five sons and a grieving husband. Through Albert’s lifetime, it was draped in fabric on the walls of the family residence. The portrait remained in the de Broglie family until shortly before Robert Lehman acquired it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Napoleon's madness.

Like he asked him to paint him in a sailor suit and brimmed hat holding a huge lollipop.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
DT517.jpg


WINSLOW HOMER, "Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts" (1870)

Just wanted to post this because I've noticed how well Homer paints waves. There's something very tangible and solid about them, the way he paints them - like they could slap you in the face.
 

luka

Well-known member
Napoleon looks like the man who's been pulling 18 hour shifts in the kebab shop opposite for the 5 or 6 years I've been living here. I've been watching him gradually turn from living human into fat, pasty, haggard ghoul. Terrible really. Work destroys people.
 
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