Bronze Statues in Los Angeles

circle of Jacquio Ponce
Reclining Allegorical Figures of Magnificence and Magnanimity
ca. 1575
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"The unconscious is an interference apparatus that produces slips of the tongue, mistakes, sudden failures of recall, and so on. As we've seen, in analysis all these mistakes can supposedly be interpreted, as having unconscious intentions, so they are not really mistakes at all. Nevertheless, Freud's vision of the mind stressed its internal division and opacity."

Anonymous Italian sculptor
Figure of Portia
ca. 1680
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Antoine Etex
Death of Hyacinthus
ca. 1829
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"Lacan, following Freud, located that internal split in the subject's relation to language: language precedes the self and exceeds its control, so language is also a major interference apparatus. This insight has led literary theorists, including Barthes, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to think of the literary text in the same way, that is, as exceeding its author's control."

Frederic Leighton
The Sluggard
ca. 1890
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Francisque-Joseph Duret
Dancing Neapolitan boy
ca. 1838
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"We are perhaps nearing an understanding of the meaning of chance in art. It would, of course, be unbearable if our intentions were regularly frustrated. Yet there is something terribly arid, not to say mechanistic, in the idea of a world where all our purposes result in predictable consequences, where we are completely transparent to ourselves and where intentions always result in expected actions."

– quoted passages are from Margaret Iverson's essay The Aesthetics of Chance, published by Whitechapel Gallery in 2010

Giacomo Zoffoli
copy of the Apollo Belvedere
late 18th century
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Anonymous Florentine sculptor
Risen Christ
ca. 1620
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Giovanni Battista Foggini
Time Ravishing Beauty
ca. 1700-1725
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Anonymous Egyptian sculptor
Figurine of the God Bes
25th Dynasty, 711-657 BC
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Antoine-Louis Barye
Theseus and the Minotaur
ca. 1860
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Guillaume Boichot
Seated Hercules
ca. 1795
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(gift of William Randolph Hearst)

Auguste Rodin
Female Centaur
ca. 1887-89
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Auguste Rodin
Female Centaur
ca. 1887-89
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Auguste Rodin
The Shade
ca. 1880
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

I am grateful to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for making photographs of the sculpture collection available.

Portrait Busts and Mythical Beings

François Masson
Portrait of Madame Roland
ca. 1792-93
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

From 1791 to 1793 – at the melodramatic pinnacle of the French Revolution – Madame Roland was one of the most politically powerful individuals in France. Furthering her husband's government career and using his position as a lever, Madame Roland became famous as figurehead, spokesperson, and decision-maker for the Girondist faction. When that faction fell and was purged by Robespierre in 1793, Madame Roland went to the guillotine. This she accomplished with a noble, fearless demeanor, dressed in a beautiful white gown, with strands of her beautiful black hair falling about her shoulders. Michelet in his once-definitive 19th-century history of the Revolution, depicted her as a tragic Roman heroine transported to the modern age.

Jean-Antoine Houdon
Portrait of Giuseppe Balsame, called Count Alessandro Cagliostro
ca. 1786
plaster
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Encylcopaedia Britannica lists Alessandro, Count di Cagliostro (1743-1795) under the designation Italian Charlatan. He had been an enormously fashionable conductor of seances in Paris during the mid-1780s. In 1789, just before the French Revolution occurred, Cagliostro was banished from France, after a period of imprisonment in the Bastille. He returned to Italy, where his wife "the Roman beauty Lorenza Feliciani" denounced him to the Inquistion as "a heretic, magician, conjuror and Freemason." He was promptly imprisoned again, and it was in an Italian prison a few years later that he died.

Giovanni Bandini
Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici
ca. 1572
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"Italian political leaders showed a preference for having themselves depicted in the manner of the great heroes and warriors of classical antiquity. Their intention was to exalt their authority both through their military and political deeds and through their own image." Cosimo I de' Medici seized control of the government in Florence at age seventeen, following the opportune assassination of a relative. Giovanni Bandini carved him in marble much later, after Cosimo had retired from a lifetime of satisfied power-consolidation.

Domenico Guidi
Portrait of Pope Alexander VIII
1691
gilded terracotta
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Alexander VIII was almost eighty years old when chosen as Pope in 1689. He belonged to the Ottoboni family of Venice, who were of course rich and powerful, but his election actually had been effected by agents of Louis XIV, the young French king, who expected political concessions in return. In his short reign – slightly more than a year – the new Pope apparently spent most of his time and energy enriching his own family. That was the papal tradition, and he is remembered as an ardent follower of it.    

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Marie de' Medici, Queen of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Marie de' Medici, Queen of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Marie de' Medici (1575-1642) is dear to posterity as the principal patron of Rubens. She came from Florence as a young girl in 1600 to marry the French king, Henri IV (below). Many people, then and now, have believed she was involved in her husband's assassination ten years later. Certainly she took up the government with enthusiasm after he died, and proceeded to reverse many established policies.  

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Henri IV, King of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Henri IV, King of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Felipe Ydalgo Buenfiglio
Bust of a female Saint
1750s
polychromed wood
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Ludovico Lombardo
Bust of Lucius Junius Brutus
ca. 1550
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Lucius Junius Brutus was "the legendary founder of the Roman Republic." His bronze representation, as venerated in modern Rome, appeared on this rolling screen here some while back. The bust above was one of many contemporary versions. A similar process of imaginary portraiture would be repeated a few centuries later in America, with idealized heads of George Washington multiplying and diversifying in widening circles after his death.  

Lansdowne Bust of Athena of Velletri
Rome
2nd century AD
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(gift of William Randolph Hearst)

Lambert Sigisbert Adam
Bust of Neptune
ca. 1725-27
terracotta
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Louis-Claude Vasse
Head of a Faun
ca. 1750
terracotta
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

imitator of Gianlorenzo Bernini
Head of Proserpina
ca. 1770-1800
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

I am grateful to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for making photographs of the sculpture collection available.

Painted Realism by Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet
Self-Portrait
1842
oil on canvas
Musée municipale de Pontarlier

Gustave Courbet
Portrait of Juliette Courbet
1844
canvas
Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

Gustave Courbet
Wounded Man
ca. 1844-54
canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

"The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was thrust upon the men of 1830. Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the work would be unnecessary."

– Gustave Courbet (1851)

Gustave Courbet
Seated young man
1847
drawing
private collection

Gustave Courbet
Studies
1847
drawing
Louvre

Gustave Courbet
Artist at an easel
1847-48
drawing
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

Gustave Courbet
Portrait of Baudelaire
ca. 1848
oil on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Gustave Courbet
Beach near Trouville
1865
oil on canvas
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne

Gustave Courbet
The Wave
1869-70
oil on canvas
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

Gustave Courbet
Wrestlers
1853
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Gustave Courbet
The Sea of Palavas
1854
oil on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

 

Gustave Courbet
Three English Girls
1865
oil on canvas
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Gustave Courbet
Cliffs at Étretat
1870
oil on canvas
Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Gustave Courbet
Cliffs at Étretat after storm
1869-70
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

"Art in painting should consist only of the representation of things that are visible and tangible to the artist. Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artists who have lived in it. I also maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art form and can exist only through the representation of both real and existing things. An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is not within the domain of painting."

– Gustave Courbet (1861)

Painted Romanticism by Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix
Mademoiselle Rose
ca. 1820
oil on canvas
Louvre

Eugène Delacroix
Barque of Dante
1822
oil on canvas
Louvre

Quotations below are translated excerpts from Delacroix's journals and letters –

"There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery."

Eugène Delacroix
Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi
1826
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux

Eugène Delacroix
Still life with lobster
1826-27
oil on canvas
Louvre

"I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure."

Eugène Delacroix
Execution of Doge Marino Faliero
1826-27
oil on canvas
Wallace Collection, London

Eugène Delacroix
Woman with a parrot
1827
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Eugène Delacroix
Liberty leading the people
1830
oil on canvas
Louvre

"They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other."

Eugène Delacroix
Justice (detail of mural)
1833-37
oil & wax on plaster
Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris

Eugène Delacroix
Justice (detail of mural)
1833-37
oil & wax on plaster
Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris

Eugène Delacroix
War (detail of mural)
1833-37
oil & wax on plaster
Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris

Eugène Delacroix
Cleopatra with a peasant delivering a serpent
1838
oil on canvas
Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Eugène Delacroix
Sketch for Peace Descends to Earth
1852
oil on canvas
Musée de Petit Palais, Paris

"... art is no longer what the vulgar think it to be, that is, some sort of inspiration which comes from nowhere, which proceeds by chance, and presents no more than the picturesque externals of things. It is reason itself, adorned by genius, but following a necessary course and encompassed by higher laws."

Eugène Delacroix
Lion hunt in Morocco
1854
oil on canvas
Hermitage

In Morocco, Delacroix felt that he had discovered "men who were more men than us." He concluded that "... to paint such men, it is necessary to take on the greatest difficulty, which consists in moving at every instant from an admiring style to an informal style that lends itself to painting grotesque scenes. You must, so to speak, change pens all the time. You see the most imposing and the most ridiculous things pass before your eyes without transition."   

Eugène Delacroix
Jaguar attacking a horse
ca. 1855
oil on canvas
Národní Galerie, Prague

"Michelangelo did not know a single one of the feelings of man, not one of his passions. When he was making an arm or a leg, it seems as if he were thinking only of that arm or leg and was not giving the slightest consideration to the way it relates with the action of the figure to which it belongs, much less to the action of the picture as a whole. Therein lies his great merit - he brings a sense of the grand and the terrible into even an isolated limb."