FeaturesJune 1995 Small wonder; the forgotten art of Giuseppe de Nittis by Mario Naves On “Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Italian Painting from the Gaetano Marzotto Collection” opened at the National Academy of Design, New York, on April 20, 1995, and remains on view through June 11. The splendor of nineteenth-century French painting is so much a part of that epoch that it is almost easy to overlook the fact that painting was going on elsewhere during that time. This is, of course, an exaggeration. Even the most dilatory student of art history can name a few nineteenth-century painters of distinction working outside of France: Constable and Turner in England, for instance, or maybe Homer in the United States. Yet there can be no denying the pre-eminence of French painting in that century, as well as at the beginning of our own. The extraordinary confluence of talent and genius that was Impressionism alone is all but inconceivable to us today, inured, as we are, to a culture predicated on the gratifications of irony and spectacle. So who can blame Roberto Tassi, essayist of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Masterpieces of ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 13 June 1995, on page 47 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Small-wonder--the-forgotten-art-of-Giuseppe-de-Nittis-4261
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by Mario Naves On "Maurizio Cattelan: All" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem, New York. Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
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