Frederic bazille12/16/2023 ![]() It is not surprising to see a growing body of paintings and drawings by Bazille that our research, analysis and investigations have led us to attribute to the artist. So, rather than imposing conclusions which, in any case, can only be very nuanced, we thought it preferable to offer you all the data on which a judgment can be made. Bazille seems to us to be situated, in a variable equilibrium, between several movements of his time. His place is therefore much more complex than his friendship and work relationships alone might lead us to believe. Therefore, without underestimating the strength of his ties to them, we can also situate him in a pictorial continuity that is alien to them. Moreover, as a comrade-in-arms of the devotees of the Northern light, he is a painter from the South who sees other things under a different sky. But, as an avant-garde painter with them, Bazille, through another facet of his nature, is in love with tradition he is aware of his debt to the masters who preceded him in his own century. He was even at its center, since he contributed with his energy and generosity to keeping it alive he worked in close affection and camaraderie with Monet, Renoir and Sisley, even offering lodging to the first two on occasion. If we look at the Impressionists as a group of artists who rebelled against the all-powerful official academicism and intended to renew painting, then Bazille was certainly part of it. There is no reason to believe that Bazille, had he lived at the time, would have accepted it as well. In 1874, a handful of young painters who had never felt that they belonged to or desired to establish a school, and had never bothered to adopt a shared doctrine, were derisively called Impressionists and this term, as it fittingly enough reflected what they were all striving to express, their supporters, like themselves, accepted it. But art historians, because they only discovered him late, at the beginning of this century, have deliberately placed him in a perspective that is largely posterior to his own they have often associated him with aesthetic trends that were perhaps not his own or were only partially his own, and have included him in a movement in which he had not fully participated. After this revelation, capital but limited, he only gradually acquired the renown he deserved during exhibitions in 1910, 1923, 1935, in 1941 for the centenary of his birth and in 1950 at the Wildenstein Gallery finally, Bazille appeared several times in impressionist exhibitions, first in 1992 in Montpellier and New York, in Paris in 1994 and lastly in Montpellier, Paris and Washington in 2016-2017.īut has Bazille really found his true place? On closer inspection, nothing is less certain. Only then did the world catch a glimpse of a great painter it had, so to speak, barely heard of. It was only in 1900, at the Centennale de l’art français, organized for the World's Fair, that two of his major paintings appeared. When he died at the age of twenty-nine in 1870, Frédéric Bazille had hardly had time to make himself known beyond his circle of friends. We have kept the French name for the other works. ![]() The names of Bazille's works are all translated into English. This new publication also provides the latest information on the exhibitions and bibliography of his work.Īll texts are published in English and French. It is the purpose of our abundantly illustrated biography of the man and the artist to follow his evolution which will lead him to prefer art to medicine and to take his own path in the history of art. ![]() ![]() Through Bazille's abundant correspondence, we discover an endearing personality, his solid Montpellier roots, his fidelity to his family and his culture, which is reflected in his Protestant education. Such as the Portrait of Verlaine, Woman Ironing, Still Life with Grapes and Nuts, Portrait of Renoir, Monotonous Chant, End of a Summer Day, Family Portrait and Young Woman with Peonies. The result of forty years of study and expertise, it also includes our important discoveries, justified either by their provenance or by historical, scientific or technical cross-checks on which our analyses and opinion are based. This digital catalogue raisonné of the complete works of Frédéric Bazille, published April 3 2022, takes into account the latest research on the artist and is regularly updated.
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