Art in New York

Abstract

THE EXHIBITION Of paintings and drawings by Claude Gellee, or Claude Lorrain, at the Durlacher Gallery is the first “one-man show” ever held in this country of the work of this great seventeenth-century artist, the contemporary of Poussin and the first landscape painter to concentrate upon the problems of light and atmosphere. The reason for this apparent neglect of Claude is that it is not easy to obtain examples of his work for exhibition. Even in the splendid canvases by him here, one feels a pang of regret at the absence of his magnificent “seaports,” “embarkations” and “landings.” Claude reached Naples during the reign of Louis XIV, as an apprentice to a pastrycook; later he became a servant and later an assistant in a fashionable decorator's studio in Rome. By the flight to Italy, he succeeded in escaping the consuming rays of the “Sun King” and the pedantry of the Royal Academy. In the establishment of Tassi he learned the technique of fresco painting which he practiced for many years. It was not until his maturity, after working with a German artist, that he acquired a reputation for oil painting.