![]() ![]() ![]() He was the perfect foil to Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Claude Monet (1840-1926), and Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), not because he was a popular and successful Salon artist but because he railed against his Impressionist counterparts, often and in public, on the record. Gérôme was art history’s most vile villain, most reliable enemy to all things Modernist. Art falls into the perilous zone of subjectivity and art and artists are subjected to the rise and fall of critical preferences and of aesthetic judgments. However, art history is more subjective than history-history, which is supposedly based upon verifiable facts. Many people have been on the wrong side of history, and, like the segregationist Senator, Strom Thurmond, they deserve to stay there. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904) was on the wrong side of history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |