|
|
|
|
|
Biografías |
|
|
Contenidos disponibles en
español y en inglés - Availables resources in spanish and english. Jacques Louis David fue el pintor que mejor encarna el espíritu del neoclasicismo y de la pintura neoclasicista francesa. Nació en 1748 y a temprana edad estudió en la Academia de París. Sus viajes a Italia donde halló los restos de la civilización romana antigua fueron conformando su pintura. La vida de David estuvo vinculada a los avatares políticos de la época. Participó activamente en la Revolución Francesa, pero su relación con Robespierre le condujo a la cárcel. Al salir de ella se convirtió en el retratista oficial de Napoleón y tras su caída fue desterrado a Bruselas. Jacques Louis David ejerció con su obra una magna influencia en la pintura europea de la época. Su escuela fue afamada y recibió pintores de todas las naciones entre los que hay que reseñar los españoles José de Madrazo y Juan Antonio Ribera. Jacques Louis David en sus primeros años, antes de la Revolución Francesa Un David joven ingresa en la Academia de París donde obtiene, en 1774, un premio para ir a Roma. Su primera estancia en la Ciudad Eterna le aporta una disciplina dibujística importante, lo cual no le impide admirar a los pintores barrocos que trabajan con la luz porque cree que la luz da un volumen que la línea no puede lograr. Posteriormente marcha a Nápoles y allí estudia las ruinas de las ciudades de Pompeya y Herculano. A su vuelta a París, Jacques Louis David queda convencido de que es necesaria una regeneración del arte. Algunas de las primeras obras de Jacques Louis David más importantes son:
Retrato de un personaje de la nobleza
Andrómaca velando a Héctor David vuelve a Roma en 1784 con una misión oficial, la de levantar una serie de esculturas de la antigüedad para las funciones docentes de la Academia francesa. En esta etapa pinta: El
Juramento de los Horacios En este cuadro se da un perfecto paralelismo entre pintura y literatura, ya que nace directamente de una representación teatral en Roma, de la que David tomó la idea. El Juramento de los Horacios es una cuadro que muestra perfectamente lo que es una estructura teatral en la pintura. Delimita y marca el fondo con las arquerías y columnas. En la parte central está el padre, mientras que en uno de los lados, los hijos inician el movimiento al unísono de coger las espadas. Al otro lado, aparecen las mujeres abatidas. Todos ellos conforman la escena de la consolación y tristeza. La pintura representa simultáneamente tres momentos y tres sentimientos: dolor, tristeza y lealtad
Muerte de Sócrates Aunque el conjunto denota cierta frialdad, la composición de la escena es extraordinaria, gracias a la acertada colocación de las figuras, los efectos de luz, etc.
Los lictores devuelven a Brutus los cuerpos muertos de sus hijos Llama la atención la figura aislada pensativa de Brutus, que tiene tras él una estatua de la República. Como detalle, este cuadro contiene un bodegón espléndido de una cesta de costura sobre la mesa (único detalle que revela la realidad familiar). Otro aspecto notable es el estudio perfecto de la luz Luz cuyo mejor ejemplo es el contra luz de la estatua de la República citada. Jacques Louis David y la Revolución Francesa En 1789 estalla la revolución y David está totalmente absorbido e implicado en ella. Jacques Louis David fue diputado de la Convención, formando parte del Comité de Salvación. Organizó la enseñanza del arte sobre las bases libertarias, votó la muerte del rey, se ocupó del urbanismo, de la restauración de los monumentos, etc. Durante este periodo convulso pinto otra de sus más afamadas obras:
Marat asesinado Además, el cuchillo con el que es asesinado Marat representa la violencia irracional de la asesina frente a la pluma y papel que es la sabiduría del tribuno No es un cuadro narrativo sino una "foto fija". Poco después, David cae en desgracia por su amistad con Robespierre y es encarcelado, hasta que es puesto en libertad en el año 1795. David abre un taller porque se encuentra asqueado por la sociedad corrompida que contempla al salir de la cárcel. Se da cuenta que la lucha por ideales y pureza de costumbres que había protagonizado en la Revolución Francesa había fracasado. Jacques Louis David y Napoleón Napoleón, consciente de la estrecha relación que une a pintura y teatro, y su importancia como elemento propagandístico, incorpora a David a la corte como retratista. En esta etapa Jacques Louis David pinta:
Napoleón a caballo El propio Napoleón le pide que haga una crónica de su Coronación (2 de diciembre de 1804). David acude al acto y toma diferentes bocetos, aunque Napoleón le hace cambiar de esquema obligándole a basarse también en los modelos barrocos. La
Coronación de Napoleón Esta obra se ha considerado como una magnífica fusión de lo Barroco y la modernidad en la representación de los héroes. Retratos de David Jacques Louis David también cultivó el retrato. En este género de muestra intimista y preocupado por la captación psicológica de los personajes.
Retrato del Papa Pío VII
Retrato de una mujer
Madame Recamier De nuevo David hace aquí un alarde de sabia composición. Biography - Kathryn Calley Galitz - Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Ar The art of Jacques-Louis David embodies the style known as Neoclassicism, which flourished in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. David championed a style of rigorous contours, sculpted forms, and polished surfaces; history paintings, such as his Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (Musée du Louvre, Paris) of 1789, were intended as moral exemplars. He painted in the service of royalty, radical revolutionaries, and an emperor; although his political allegiances shifted, he remained faithful to the tenets of Neoclassicism, which he transmitted to a generation of students, including Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, François Gérard, Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.The completion in 1814 of David's monumental history painting, Leonidas at Thermopylae (Louvre), coincided with the fall of Napoleon; not surprisingly, the image of the courageous Spartan king, facing imminent defeat in battle, met with Napoleon's disapproval in the aftermath of his disastrous Russian campaign. The painting, which David had first conceived in 1798 while working on his Intervention of the Sabine Women (Louvre), evolved over a period that witnessed challenges to the stylistic hegemony of Davidian Neoclassicism. In the revolutionary ferment of the 1790s, several of David's students had already rebelled against their master, notably Girodet, whom David would later describe as a "lunatic" (in 1810, Girodet would triumph over his former teacher in the competition for the Prize of the Decade, awarded to his painting The Deluge [Louvre]). In his Sleep of Endymion of 1791 (Louvre), Girodet emphatically departs from David's precedent in his sensual handling of the androgynous figure of Endymion and his choice of a mythological subject devoid of moral value. In the late 1790s, a group of David's students, known as the Primitifs (Primitives) or Barbus (Bearded Ones), rejected the values of Davidian classicism in favor of an art whose linear purity and simplicity recalled archaic Greek vase painting as well as early Renaissance art. These challenges to the primacy of David's Neoclassical style set the stage for a radical redefinition of history painting around 1800 in France. Before the Revolution, David's major history paintings, though often invoked in relation to contemporary events, drew upon subjects from ancient history and distant civilizations (Death of Socrates, 31.45); his approach was in keeping with that of the French Academy, which placed history painting at the top of its hierarchy of subjects while scenes from contemporary life were relegated to the bottom order. However, after 1789, the Revolution and its heroes came to the forefront in the art of David and his contemporaries. Capitalizing on this trend, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his dramatic rise to power, marshaled art in service of his regime and commissioned artists to document contemporary history as it unfolded. He appointed David "First Painter to the Emperor" in 1804 and enlisted many of his pupils to chronicle his triumphs. Gros, who had painted Napoleon as a young general in Italy in 1796, reveals his mastery of the Napoleonic propaganda machine in his Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa of 1804 (Louvre), an image from Napoleon's Middle Eastern campaign. Gros' portrayal of Napoleon, shown touching the sore of a plague-ridden French soldier, alludes both to images of Christ as healer and the divine touch of kings. Around 1800, while David and many of his pupils were fueling Napoleon's propaganda machine, a number of artists in his studio turned to France's medieval past for inspiration. This group of artists from southern France, which included Pierre Révoil, Fleury Richard, and François-Marius Granet, painted small-scale works rendered with a precise, meticulous finish in what became known as the Troubadour style. Their retrospective subjects coincided with the establishment of Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des Antiquités et Monuments Français, which opened to the public in 1796 and housed the sculpture from French churches that had been saved from destruction during the Revolution. The monastic interiors that became a specialty of the painter Granet evoke the Catholic past enshrined in Lenoir's museum (2003.42.36). The historicism of the Troubadour style would inform the emerging Romantic aesthetic in the early nineteenth century. In portraiture, the carefully modeled and polished surfaces of works by Gérard, Gros, and Girodet—all students of David—reflect the legacy of their master. In his 1823 portrait of Madame Reizet, Girodet, whose portraits were in great demand, convincingly renders the varying textures of fur, velvet, lace, and flesh, creating a smooth surface with no visible brushwork (1999.101). Yet another Davidian, Ingres, who was briefly in David's studio in the late 1790s, would transform his master's Neoclassical portrait model in the nineteenth century (1977.10). While the precise draftsmanship of his portrait drawings attests to his training under David (29.100.191), the stylized contours and anatomical distortions characteristic of his painted portraits subvert David's model. In his pair of portraits of the Leblancs (19.77.1; 19.77.2), Ingres flattens forms and elongates limbs; such stylized abstractions counter the almost hyperrealism of such fabrics as the cashmere shawl and tulle sleeves. He creates a similar dialogue in his portrait of the princesse de Broglie of 1853 (1975.1.186): the virtuoso rendering of the multiple folds of her silk skirt, the tufted damask chair, and the marabou feathers of her hair ornament counters the mannered elongation of her arms, her seemingly boneless fingers, and her idealized face. By the 1820s, the new Romantic style, with its free handling of paint and expanded repertoire of subjects, offered an alternative to Davidian Neoclassicism. David himself had been exiled to Belgium in 1816, where he died in 1825, and his studio was run by his loyal pupil Gros until his own death in 1835. In pursuing the stylistic alternative that Romanticism offered, French artists looked beyond their borders, emulating British prototypes, particularly in landscape and portraiture. In addition, the boundaries between Neoclassicism and Romanticism blurred, as evidenced in the works of many of David's own pupils. By 1840, then, the emergence of an artist such as Théodore Chassériau, whose hybrid style fuses Davidian classicism—which he learned in Ingres' studio—with the Romantic painterliness and exotic subjects of Eugène Delacroix, captures the contradictory stylistic impulses of his generation. |
|
|
|
AVIZORA |
