Why so sad? Watteau's Pierrots

• Judy Sund ^[1]
  1. [1] CUNY Graduate center, New York
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 98, Nº 3, 2016, págs. 321-347
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The reattribution to Antoine Watteau of "The Italian Comedians" acquired by the Getty Museum in 2012 prompts reconsideration of that artist's many renderings of Pierrot -a character he saw performed as a dim-witted bumbler in early eighteenth-century productions. When, in the following century, Pierrot was recast as forlorn, Watteau's best-known portrayal of him (now in the Louvre) was retroactively reread as both the prototypical sad clown -forebear to those of Honoré Daumier and Théodore de Banville -and a projection of its maker's malaise. Continued allegiance to these anachronistic assumptions unduly constrains imaginative engagement with the multidimensional Pierrots of Watteau's open-ended oeuvre.