by Jon Lackman | 11 May 2010 | Books, Modern
Also in the April 2010 Art Newspaper, Christopher Riopelle considers Susan Siegfried’s Ingres: Painting Reimagined:
The past 15 years or so have been something of a golden age for Ingres studies. The central role that David played a generation ago in studies of the heroic origins of modern art has faded somewhat as scholars now explore their fascination with the more ambivalent and contradictory works of his leading students, Ingres among them … With Ingres, it seems, the ambiguities at the heart of the modern enterprise begin to become clearer. The strangeness of his art, his fascination with febrile psychological states and their exotic and erotic accoutrements, the inherent contradictions in what he had to say about his art and art in general, his singular failure to teach a new generation to be as greatly daring as he had been; all these issues serve to situate Ingres at the cusp of modernity along with his polar opposite, Courbet—it was Baudelaire who first linked them as the representative artists of the age. It is in this context that Siegfried’s handsome, densely argued new volume appears—the fullest, most penetrating account yet of our ongoing problem with Ingres.
