The attached VANITY FAIR article announced that the numero uno society portrait painter of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925) was swearing-off portrait commissions in order to concentrate on water color. Little did he know that he would be back at it in a few years painting whole boat-loads of general officer portraits when he was named as one of the Official British War Artists. In this article, "The Mob as Art Critic", an anonymous reviewer gathered excerpts from assorted negative reviews concerning the New York Armory Show of 1913 in an attempt to show the often violent reaction the exhibit inspired. Just prior to the death of Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917), the Welsh poet and essayist, Arthur Symons (1865-1945), reviewed a book written by the French writer, Judith Cladel (1873-1958) concerning the artist's work and creative temperament:
"AUGUSTE RODIN PRIS SUR LA VIE at once a document and a living thing. The main interest lies in the exactitude with which it records the actual words of Rodin, much as he must have spoken them"
Not long after the death of Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917) Paris-based artist Stephen Haweis (1878 - 1969) remembered his friendship with the French sculptor: "He loved flattery, as all human beings do, and would listen attentively to rhapsodies from almost anybody, though they do say that a pretty lady got more attention from him than a half-starved journalist."
"Rodin proclaimed himself the culminator of one era of sculpture, the inspirer, and nearly the author of another. He was the father of various schools which are lumped under the title of Modern Art." The attached article is about a 1921 exhibition displaying the art of the mentally ill; it was organized under the direction of the psychiatric department of Heidelberg University. The exhibition made quite an impact on a number of modernists at the time and it is said that a few of the pieces from the show were later displayed in the 1938 "Degenerate Art" exhibit that the Nazis launched in an effort to discredit modernism. When this profile of the thirty-tree year-old Thomas Hart Benton (1889 - 1975) was published, the painter was not as yet recognized as the eccentric that history remembers him to have been. The anonymous journalist took an enormous interest in understanding Benton's education and the source of his inspiration.
Click hereto read a 1936 art review regarding the paintings of Grant Wood.
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