Word: painterly
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...have influenced a great artist may not make a painter great, but it does help make him interesting; and probably no one had more impact on William Blake than John Henry Fuseli. To look at Blake's nudes and then at Fu-seli's, with their rhetorical gestures and armor-plate muscles, is to sense this. Then reckon in Fuseli's eccentricities, which though irreligious were akin to Blake's own, and it seems clear why the younger painter spared Fuseli the contempt he felt for nearly every other English artist of his day. Fuseli...
Fuseli was actually neither Turk nor Jew, but Swiss; he was born Johann Heinrich Fiissli in Zurich in 1741, the son of a portrait painter. By 1825, when he died, he had become one of the most distinguished exiles in English art history; he was even buried next to Sir Joshua Reynolds in St. Paul's. Last week, to mark the 150th anniversary of his death, a show of more than 200 Fuselis-oils, engravings and drawings-opened at London's Tate Gallery...
...would be hard to improve on Sir Kenneth Clark's account of Fuseli's ambition: he wanted "to render the most dramatic episodes of Shakespeare in the pictorial language of Michelangelo." Fuseli was not a painter when he went to England in 1764, but a young Zwinglian minister whose liberal ideas had driven him out of Zurich. His intransigence grew with time, ripening into the melancholy sarcasm that was one of his more noted traits. "He is everything in extremes-always an original," wrote Fuseli's close friend, the physiognomist Lavater. "His look is lightning, his word...
Considering himself a mural painter instead of an easel painter, Benton, after completing the 18-ft. by 31-ft. mural Independence and the Opening of the West (1961) in the Truman Library, told us, "When I came out of the Navy, after the first World War, I made up my mind that I wasn't going to be just a studio painter, a pattern maker in the fashion then dominating the art world-as it still does. I began to think of returning to the painting of subjects-subjects with meaning-which people in general might be interested...
...touched, but perhaps the deepest transformation of a theme that he set off was the imagery of the terrestrial paradise, which he changed into a thoroughly erotic Eden: the island of Cythera, sacred to Aphrodite. It was from this delectable abode of profane love that the 18th century painters of the féte champétre drew their inspiration. Rubens' outdoor courts of pagan love became Watteau's exquisite assemblies of lovers and Pierrots, at dusk, beside the Mozartian stone statue. This vision of a society of the elect united by love (which is equally the root...