I was reading an article online about the movie “Avatar” which pointed out that, surprisingly enough, a magnificently conceived and beautifully executed work can nonetheless fail to capture the popular imagination. I was curious what the classical painting or sculpture equivalent might be. A work that art critics unanimously declare to be a masterpiece, yet one that figuratively speaking can only look on with bitter envy at Andy Warhol’s painting of a Campbell’s Soup can.
Arnolfini Portrait
I think they’re extraterrestrials, myself.
Hopper’s Nighthawks is one of my favorite paintings, but it gets overshadowed in the popular mind by Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
I like Nighthawks too and in fact hung a print in my room many years back. Had never heard of Boulevard of Broken Dreams and had to look it up. Is it really that famous?
Las Meninas by Velazquez was voted the greatest painting of all time in a 1985 poll of artists and critics but I don’t know if it’s all that well known by the general public. I certainly can’t think of any pop culture parodies for it like the countless ones there are for say, the Mona Lisa or the Creation of Adam or American Gothic.
The art world generally loved American Gothic. The people of Iowa, however, felt it portrayed them as “pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers.” Eventually they came around.
Gericault’s Wreck of the Medusa gets my vote.
Here’s the Wikipedia link discussing it:
Quote:
At 491 by 716 cm (16 ft 1 in by 23 ft 6 in),[2] it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism (the custom of the sea). The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain.
Géricault chose to depict this event in order to launch his career with a large-scale uncommissioned work on a subject that had already generated great public interest.[3] The event fascinated him, and before he began work on the final painting, he undertook extensive research and produced many preparatory sketches. He interviewed two of the survivors and constructed a detailed scale model of the raft. He visited hospitals and morgues where he could view, first-hand, the colour and texture of the flesh of the dying and dead. As he had anticipated, the painting proved highly controversial at its first appearance in the 1819 Paris Salon, attracting passionate praise and condemnation in equal measure. However, it established his international reputation and today is widely seen as seminal in the early history of the Romantic movement in French painting.
Paris has a Museum of Modern Art, which is less known than those in other cities. It’s showpiece is equally unknown, La Fée Electricité (the Spirit of Electricity" by Raoul Dufy. The fresco covers three large walls. You can get lost in it. The small image on a screen doesn’t do it justice, but here it is anyway.
FWIW,
I’ve been in the jigsaw puzzle business for 19 years and except for the Dufy, I’ve sold a puzzle version of every painting mentioned in this thread. (La Fée Electricité isn’t in the public domain, so not a surprise.) It takes a certain level of popular appreciation to make it worthwhile to sell a fine art piece as a puzzle. I chose Arnolfini because it sells badly.
My second exposure to that painting was from the cover of the Pogues album, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. I later realized that my first exposure was from an Asterix and Obelisk comic.
As soon as I saw it, I loved Goya’s “The Family of the Infante Don Luis.” There is a hell of a lot going on in the painting.
When people think of Goya, it’s usually “The Naked Maja” or “The Clothed Maja.”
“For most art historians today, the 1870s are known as the Impressionist Years, when the practitioners of the new style exhibited their works in defiance of reactionary academic tradition. But even “official art” at the Exposition showed a remarkable variety. Pierre Bonnat and Ernest Meissonier were the grand old men of the show, as Ingres and Delacroix had been in 1855. Each artist had a room in the fine arts section entirely devoted to his works. Meissonier in particular was at the height of his fame; and his clever genre scenes brought enormous prices. Adolphe Bouguereau’s exquisitely rendered religious and mythological scenes and Alexandre Cabanel’s “Death of Francesco da Rimini” were the rage of the day. Who would have predicted, in 1878, that after a hundred years, the names of these four most prominent French artists of the day would sink into obscurity?” (By Arthur Chandler, at his eponymous website.)
They are still well represented in the Musee d’Orsay. You know these guys?
Yes. For the most part, they are viewed by modern art critics as kitsch; especially Bouguereau. They make great puzzles…just like Thomas Kinkade.
I want to point out a trend - it’s predominantly paintings.
I bring it up because I’m a fan of classic sculpture, but most of the people I know can maybe come up with ‘David’, maybe ‘The Thinker’ and ‘the one without any arms’ when it comes to discussion on the topic.
I know among art mavens, it isn’t nearly as bad, but still in general all sculpture is underappreciated, no matter it’s fame and quality. I come by this appreciation very weirdly, becoming a fan of Rodin after reading ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ and finding it’s description of “Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone” eerily apt.
I nominate Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana.
It’s somewhat well known as “the largest painting in the Louvre,” but not many people know much beyond that. And I know it’s underappreciated in person, because it’s in the same room as the Mona Lisa, literally on the opposite wall, facing Leonardo’s famous masterpiece. If you go to the Louvre and stand in that gallery, you will see hordes of people looking at the tiny little art celebrity, with their backs to the Veronese. Maybe one person in a hundred stops and gives the giant painting more than a few seconds of attention.
It deserves a lot more time and scrutiny than that. It’s a spectacular masterwork, endlessly rewarding.
The overall composition is beautifully structured and balanced, and within that structure is a bottomless well of detail. There are well over a hundred human figures in the painting (plus several animals), and every one of them is unique, engaged in a specific activity, interacting with the people around them in specific ways. Each shows an individual relationship to the celebratory event in which they’re participating. Just on a human level, it’s very entertaining.
Then as you keep looking, you realize that couched in the overall balanced composition, you find all of the specific thematic details are also balanced. For every symbolic representative of the sacred and elevated, there’s someone or something portraying the mundane or the profane, the grounded real world. The wedding couple enjoys their marriage being blessed by Jesus himself, but then in the background you’ve got possibly-drunk partygoers climbing rudely on the architecture. You’ve got the Virgin Mary making a gesture suggestive of the cup that caught Jesus’s blood, but you’ve also got a dog straining at its leash in its desire to launch itself at a cat.
It’s a spectacular piece of work. In multiple visits to the Louvre, I’ve spent probably an hour total looking at it, but if you put me in front of it right now, I could look at it for another hour.
But because it’s being displayed in close proximity to a world-famous painting, it gets overshadowed and overlooked and, yes, underappreciated.
So that’s my nomination.
(Here is a decent-sized jpg of the painting, if you want to glance it over, but believe me, for the real impact, you have to be standing in front of it.)
I nominate any of the other 35 Views of Mount Fuji besides the first. The one that everyone knows.
You know, not this one:
It’s pretty appreciated by anyone with any interest in early art or medievalism. But I get that’s a small subset of people.
I had no idea what the latter was, I had to look it up. No, I don’t think you’re correct.
Good one.
Here are a few parodies or homages of Las Meninas. The first one is by Picasso.
https://strangeling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/aliceandlasmeninas-450x304.jpg
I’m not sure what classic art means, as such, but if you’re looking for new artistic side streets to wander down, and aren’t we all, I recommend checking out some of the artists banned by the Nazis, there is some remarkable work to be found.
Personally, I think of Saturn Devouring His Son.
Something a little more pleasant to look at than Saturn eating lunch.
I give you the Venus Callipyge:
