"Long regarded as the most predictable and least admired of the grand movements of Western art, it is turning out to be full of surprises. In 2023, Antonio Canova, the movement's pre-eminent sculptor, emerged as a kind of proto-Expressionist in a double-venue US exhibition that highlighted his bracingly rough terracotta sketches. In 2024, France's long-lost Caribbean-born practitioner, Guillaume Lethière, was rescued from oblivion in a landmark Franco-American show."
"Opening a matter of days before the museum's headline-grabbing robbery last October, Jacques-Louis David is an artistic event of the highest order, even if a cohort of thieves managed to steal its thunder. Complementing the Louvre's own definitive holdings with lavish but strategic loans from around France and eight other countries, the exhibition-nominally mounted in honour of the 200th anniversary of the artist's death, aged 77, in 1825-is"
"Opening with David's handwritten visiting card from the last decade of his life, along with ghostly previews of two studio versions of his eerie and supreme work, The Death of Marat (1793), the Louvre boldly announces that it is breaking David free of the longstanding Neoclassical label in order to present him, instead, as a both a "realist" and an "idealist"."
Neoclassicism is experiencing renewed critical interest, with recent exhibitions recasting well-known practitioners in unexpected ways. Antonio Canova's terracotta studies revealed proto-Expressionist energy, and Guillaume Lethière's work received a major Franco-American revival. The Louvre mounted a large-scale Jacques-Louis David exhibition just before the museum's robbery, combining its holdings with loans from France and eight other countries to mark the 200th anniversary of David's death. The show comprises just over 100 works and aims to redefine David beyond the Neoclassical label by presenting him as both a realist and an idealist. The exhibition opens with intimate, evocative objects tied to his most famous painting.
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