Huck, I think that Gustave Caillebotte's best known work is Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers).huckelberry wrote: ↑Sun Nov 24, 2024 1:18 amWell this thread has little to do with the Book of Mormon, no discussion on the subject anyway. In fact it is tiresome. I will use that as an excuse for adding stuff.
Hey Morley, you said you were always ok with some art history discussion.
I was at a loss to identify the artist of your bathing man. For a moment or two it reminded me of Lucian Freud but way to classical technique. Perhaps an early experiment. Naw can't be. You provide a name of artist of course who I did not recognize. looking him up with the knowitall machine I recognize a few of the paintings, street scene in Paris on rainy day was lodged in my memory. But this bather is truly an odd painting. In your face realism and perhaps a criticism of artist convention of the time , or many times where an undressed woman bathing is presented for visual pleasure. The man is athletic and well painted but not particularly pretty. I may not be a good judge of homoerotic intention but I doubt there is much in the painting. Looking at some other Caillebotte painting I noticed a naked lady. Her pose reminded much of Freud, a bit awkward and very unclassical. She was rendered is a pretty manner however.
The style of bathing man reminds me of Eakins who I like quite a bit. I do not see much kiss my ass in Eakins but there is an interest in stark realism with some shock value.
Since I an just adding stuff I am thinking of Gerhard Richter whom you have updated to. I do not remember when I first saw reproductions of his work. It was some years ago before he was producing the abstract things. Like your selection the purity of the realistic image is very striking. I cannot explain but I always feel there is a lot of strength in his work even if it is not obvious just why. There is a Pacific Northwest artist James Lavadour whose later painting can have some style similarity to Richter abstracts but as soon as I compare them in my mind Richters seem solid and austere.
I'm going to stay with MG's theme of vulgarity and note that this is also the the painting of Caillebotte's that was, at the time, considered to be his most vulgar. Here he paints everyday workers, not the nobility or gods that were accepted subjects of the academy. As you know, Nineteenth Century vulgarity was associated with the common, uneducated, and everyday, which were not considered suitable subjects for a refined discipline like painting.
It was perfectly acceptable to paint naked ladies as long as they were mythological and coy--which was why Manet's Olympia caused such a scandal. Manet's Olympia was neither fantasy nor shy. Her vulgarity was manifested not in her revealed flesh, but in both her common station and the audacious return of her gaze.
To bring this back to the narrative of The Restoration, the whole story of Joseph Smith is the contrast of the vulgar with the refined elite. In the language of the 19th Century, here was a vulgar farm boy: Common, uneducated, and uncouth--but still the one chosen by God.
The vulgar over the seemingly chosen. It's a narrative that's still effectively used today.
