Word: barbizon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Unprejudiced View. By midcentury, the time's inherent romanticism found expression in a burst of landscape painting-and a new respect for human problems. Corot marched out of doors to paint, and the Barbizon school followed. Jean-Francois Millet captured the inherent dignity of peasant farmers, Daumier the poetry of the Parisian poor. But the overall point that the Minneapolis show makes is that 19th century French painting has too long been viewed as a vast academic conspiracy against the innovators who are now enshrined as the founders of modern art. It makes for a story of martyrs...
...with pennants flapping overhead and the bustling harbor beyond. To critics today, the painting's brilliant colors seem to mark a historic moment, the "thrusting open of French doors to the whole world of light outside." But the fashion of the 1860s was for brownish landscapes of the Barbizon school; Monet was able to sell his work for only $41. Six years later, his Sunrise: An Impression created a furor in Paris and gave its name to a new school of art, impressionism...
Misplaced Piety. Barbizon painters yearned for compassion in an era of harsh industrialization. Later they fell into disfavor for supposed sentimentality, but now scholars have resurrected them from the charge of Victorian piety and have shown that their passion for nature was closer to the scientific quests of Darwin than to unqualified love for small dogs and flowers. Now the U.S.'s first exhibition of Daubigny, some 82 oils, prints, and drawings, is on view at an out-of-the-way but ambitious institution, the Paine Art Center and Arboretum in Oshkosh...
Rough Drafts. "He copies nature with his soul," wrote a French critic in 1857 of Daubigny. Unlike his forerunners, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, the gentle naturalist looked more to the effects of nature than to rearranging its contours into earthen architecture. He and his Barbizon mates abandoned the brown studies of strong lights and darks that the Dutch masters used to dramatize thickets and glades that never existed outside their minds. Instead, Daubigny sketched directly from nature, in the volatile light and weather of the moment...
...Other greats of the Barbizon school: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean François Millet, Théodore Rousseau...