Corot

The quintessential painter of poetic landscapes, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot is often pegged as the direct precursor of the impressionists, or as the last neoclassicist. A more complex sense of the great French innovator is conveyed in this beautiful catalogue of a major retrospective at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Special attention is given to Corot's dramatic history paintings, which made his reputation in the 1840s. He also emerges as an inventive figurative painter who reworked certain recurrent themes, such as oddly manipulated views or figures directly facing the spectator, disconcertingly reversing the roles of the observer and the observed. An interesting essay investigates the problem of hundreds of forgeries, complicated by Corot's peculiar habit of authenticating, retouching or signing spurious copies of his works. This revelatory study gives us the many sides of an artist who ultimately eludes attempts to decode his works. The authors are curators, respectively, at the Metropolitan, the National Gallery of Canada and the Louvre. (Oct.)