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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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David's The Oath of the Horatii is in Toronto right now and so is the sketch treatment of the painting by Ingres. They are part of the AGO show Drama and Desire: Artists and the Theatre, "featuring artwork inspired by the theatre, presented 'on stage' with live performers, full-scale sets and period lighting." It's a fantastic summer show. There's a bunch of hilarious Neo-Classical paintings, over-the-top romantic paintings and etchings of scenes from Shakespeare, there's work by Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Aubrey Beardsley...tons and tons of really canonical drawings and paintings from the history books. The whole thing is staged in a fabulously cheesy theatrical setting with velvet drapery, proscenia and chandeliers, interactive props, and actors in costume wandering around spouting sonnets. When I'd just read the promo I didn't really get the concept. Well, actually I was expecting something sort of exactly like what it is, only bad. But the art is really worth looking at, with or without the theatrical theme, so there's no sense that the curators are trying to force an idea. Instead, the theatrical context is just a really fun environment for spending time with a bunch of great art and enjoying all the cheese factor that's also in the work.
