Friday, May 12, 2017

Georges de La Tour (1593-1652)

Georges de La Tour
Peasant couple eating peas
ca. 1620-25
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Georges de La Tour
Blind Musician
ca. 1620-30
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

"Little is known of Georges de La Tour's life.  By 1620 he was established at the prosperous town of Lunéville, where he specialized in religious and genre scenes.  . . .  La Tour's early mode typifies the Mannerist style of Nancy.  By the 1620s, however, he had come into contact with the art of Caravaggio, probably through prints or paintings by northern artists such as Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick ter Brugghen.  Lit by crisp daylight, La Tour's works from this period are characterized by their still atmosphere and meticulous rendering of ornament and textures.

Increasingly, La Tour was drawn to candlelight scenes in which a single flame created an atmosphere of otherworldly calm.  He gradually simplified forms until, in his late works, all masses were reduced to simple, almost geometrical shapes.  After his death, La Tour passed into virtual oblivion for almost three centuries.  In 1915 a German scholar recognized La Tour's style in several pictures that had been variously ascribed to Spanish, Dutch, and other French artists."

– curator's notes from the Getty Museum

Georges de La Tour
The Fortune Teller
1630s
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Georges de La Tour
The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs
ca. 1630-34
oil on canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Georges de La Tour
St Jerome
1630 35
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Georges de La Tour
The Musicians' Brawl
ca. 1635-40
oil on canvas
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Georges de La Tour
St Sebastian tended by St Irene
ca. 1630-35
oil on canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

"The style of Caravaggio admits of two different, one can almost say opposite, interpretations.  Some of his followers, particularly the Neapolitans, emphasized the dramatic and horrific qualities in his painting, and adapted the manner to gruesome renderings of martyrdoms in which every unpleasant detail is recorded with fidelity and heightened by chiaroscuro.  La Tour in his mature works seeks in Caravaggio exactly the opposite qualities.  He does not imitate his rendering of detail, and he avoids depiction of the disagreeable details.  Notice, for instance, that in the St Sebastian there is no blood and no anguish; the saint lies motionless and apparently dead, but with hardly a trace of his martyrdom.  The forms are generalized to their greatest simplicity, and all violence, all movement even, are eliminated, so that the picture takes on a quality of stillness and of silence rarely to be found in the visual arts."

 Anthony Blunt, from Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, first published in 1953 as part of the Pelican History of Art, revised by Richard Beresford for the 5th edition, published by Yale University Press, 1999

Georges de La Tour
Dream of St Joseph
ca. 1630-45
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Georges de La Tour
Penitent Magdalene
ca. 1635-40
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Georges de La Tour
Penitent Magdalene
ca. 1638-40
canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Georges de La Tour
Penitent Magdalene
ca. 1640
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Georges de La Tour
The Newborn
1640s
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes

Georges de La Tour
St Joseph, carpenter
1640s
oil on canvas
Louvre

Georges de La Tour
Adoration of the Shepherds
ca. 1645
canvas
Louvre

Georges de La Tour
St Thomas
before 1652
oil on canvas
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

"A certain number of artists were only rediscovered because of a memorable exhibition held in 1934, titled Les Peintures de la Réalité.  No more eloquent rebuttal could be made of the mistaken idea that all seventeenth-century art involved classical idealization.  It was crucial to recall the existence of an art attentive to everyday life, to poverty, care-worn faces, coarse delights, and humble apathy.  Yet it is impossible to categorize such work as belonging either to the raw Caravaggism that was on the ascendant from Seville to the Netherlands, or to the bambocciate fashionable in France and Italy.  They are, at best, an extension of those trends cast in another light, another nature, another perception  a transposition of familiar objects."

 André Chastel, from French Art: the Ancien Régime, 1620-1775, translated by Deke Dusinberre (Flammarion, 1996)