Status Updates From Kunst sehen

Cézanne was well read in the classics; and also proved that it is possible, if rare, to be a Balzacian, a Stendhalian and a Flaubertian all at the same time. Monet called him 'a Flaubert of painting': certainly, Cézanne had the monkishness required; also the belief that the artist behind the art should remain obscure. Though he was also - unlike Flaubert - rather prudish and proper when it came to women.(1/2)

Zola needed his literary success to be expressed in material terms: big house, fine food, social advancement, bourgeois respectability, whereas the better known Cézanne became, the more he avoided the world. In his later years, the painter was living in a quarry, seeing as few people as possible, and reading Flaubert. In the modern world, one of St Antony's temptations would be that of artistic success. 

'H.H. [Hodgkin] has always been a difficult interviewee, not least because he doesn't want to talk about his own pictures, let alone "explain" them. In later years, his refusal to play the game has become extreme. Interviewers have received monosyllabic answers and long pauses; there was a famous onstage disaster with Simon Schama at a literary festival.'

'Then there are the exterior nudes [of Vallotton]: female bathers up to the knee and thigh in the sea; a chunky Europa hitching a ride in the shallows from a very farmyard bull; a modern Andromeda with a blonde bob tied by the wrists to a rock and responding to her predicament as if it is all terribly, terribly inconvenient...'

'The first time I visited the Phillips Collection in Washington I saw a painting which instantly entered my top ten and has remained there ever since. (In fact, I saw several others that did the same—a Courbet, a Degas and a Bonnard—but then I've never counted up my top ten, which runs to well over a hundred by now.)'

'Courbet—who was born in Ornans in 1819, came to Paris at the age of twenty and had his first picture accepted by the Salon five years later—created, or adapted to his use, the persona of the boisterous, belligerent, subversive, shit-kicking provincial; then, like some contemporary TV personality, he found that this public image had become indistinguishable from his true nature.'

Delaceoiv - How Romamtic

Geticault - A Catastophe of Art -completed