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French art in the nineteenth-century French visitors to a London armoury | The young Delacroix | J.-F. Millet’s ‘Waiting’ Degas’s ‘L’Absinthe’: a new drawing | Gustave Moreau’s intentions and reputation Van Dyck | Lievens | Cox | Caillebotte | Munch | Futurism | Giacometti | Le Corbusier
USA
$34·50
May 2009
£15/€ 23
may09ratton&Ladriere:Ratton & Ladriere Sept 04 02/04/2009 14:01 Page 1
CHARLES RATTON & GUY LADRIÈRE ANTIQUE - MOYEN AGE - ARTS PRIMITIFS TABLEAUX - SCULPTURES - OBJETS D’ART
GIUSEPPE CAMMARANO SCIACCA, 1766 – NAPLES, 1850
Mythological scene Pen and brown ink with brown wash and highlights of white bodycolour over traces of black chalk, 32.5 x 43 cm. After working as an assistant decorator at the San Carlo opera house in Naples, and painting figures in Hackert’s landscapes, Cammarano went to Rome for two years. Returning to Naples, he worked for Joachim Murat, King of the Two Sicilies, and later for the Bourbons. He was appointed professor and co-director of the Academy in 1806, and in 1827 professor of drawing. This drawing is very similar to another in the Museo di San Martino, Naples, Psyché borne by the winds, dated 1811, which has the same sinuous lines influenced by german Neo-classicism, and by ancient Roman painting then being excavated in the Campania.
14, rue de Marignan, 75008 Paris. Tél. (0) 1 43.59.58.21 11, quai Voltaire, 75007 Paris. Tél (0) 1 42.61.29.79 e-mail: galerie.ratton.ladriere@wanadoo.fr
Luca Giordano
Christ Consigning the Keys to Saint Peter
Naples, 634 - 705
Oil on canvas, 103 × 75,5 cm (40 ¹⁄₂ × 29 ³⁄₄ in)
www.canesso.com 26, rue Laffitte • 75009 Paris tel. + 33 1 40 22 61 71 fax + 33 1 40 22 61 81 e-mail : contact@canesso.com
Galerie Canesso Tableaux anciens
may09pageii:Internet and Contacts 17/04/2009 12:15 Page 1
Cassone panel by the Master of Anghiari, 15th century. Representing the Battle of Zama. Estimate: SEK 3 000 000 - 4 000 000 Provenance: The estate of Dr. Emil Hultmark, Stockholm.
important sale uppsala auktionskammare is proud to present the highlight of the
auction june 2nd viewing may 22nd - 31st
online catalogue at www.uppsalaauktion.se (available from the middle of may)
eddagatan 10, 753 16 uppsala, sweden phone +46 - 18 - 12 12 22 fax +46 - 18 -14 80 97 mail@uppsalaauktion.se
Alain Mérot, Barbara Brejon and Arnauld Brejon are preparing a catalogue raisonné of the work of
SIMON VOUET (1590–1649) to appear in 2013. They would be grateful for any new information on Vouet, including his paintings, drawings or tapestries, to be sent to the following addresses: alain.Merot@paris-sorbonne.fr barbara.brejon-de-lavergne@bnf.fr arnauld.brejon@culture.gouv.fr Postal address: A.Brejon, 1 rue Berbier du Mets – 75013 Paris S.Vouet, Allégorie des bienfaits de la Paix, Cherbourg, Musée Thomas Henry
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TOMASSO BROTHERS F I N E A RT Etienne le Hongre (1628–1690)
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Equestrian Portrait of King Louis XIV
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Tel: +44 (0)113 275 5545 www.tomassobrothers.co.uk
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may09steinitz:Arturo Cuellar March 2003 21/04/2009 12:05 Page 1
S T E I N I T Z 9, rue du Cirque – 77, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré – 75008 Paris Tel: +33 (0)1 42 89 40 50
A rare and fine Jardinière Paris, circa 1780 Mahogany, chased and gilded bronze Height: 91 cm (35¾ in). Width: 69 cm (27¼ in). Depth: 42 cm (16½ in).
IFAF Round-up:Master Drawings Roundup 17/04/2009 11:48 Page 1
The International Fine Art Fair | 1st - 5th May 2009 The Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, New York | www.haughton.com/international-fairs
Portrait of Donatien Roy, by Pierre Roy. 1906. Signed, dated and inscribed: St M 06 / PATREM SUUM / ‘Pierre Roy’. Oil on canvas, 92 by 73 cm. W.M. BRADY & CO., NEW YORK
Sleeping infant, by Jules Dalou (1838–1902). Inscribed under the shoulder: ‘M. Cire perdue à Hébrard’. Cast bronze with dark brown patina, 25 by 18.5 by 14 cm. DAVID & CONSTANCE YATES, NEW YORK
Saint Genesius playing a lute, by Nicolas Tournier (1590–1639). Inscribed upper left: S.GENESIVS. Oil on canvas, 132 by 98 cm. ROBILANT + VOENA, MILAN AND LONDON
Monsieur and Madame Galin before the Jockey Club, by Jean Béraud (1849–1936). c.1877. Signed. Oil on canvas, 35.7 by 27.2 cm. MACCONNAL MASON, LONDON
Monumental torso, by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). Bronze. Height: 104.1 cm. SLADMORE GALLERY, LONDON
The wailing wall, by Eugene Alexis Girardet (1853–1907). Signed. Oil on canvas, 74 by 48.3 cm. REHS GALLERIES INC., NEW YORK
may09feigen:Agnews 20/04/2009 11:22 Page 1
RICHARD L. FEIGEN & COMPANY 14th - 20th Century Masters
Eugène Delacroix Study of Armour, circa 1823. Oil on paper laid down on canvas, 7 by 111/2 inches. Vente Delacroix, 1864, lot 189. Robaut, no. 1919. Johnson, 2002, no. 26a.
Richard Parkes Bonington Study of a 16th Century Half Suit of Armour, circa 1825. Oil on canvas, 93/4 by 8 inches. Noon, 2008, no. 392.
34 east 69th street, new york, ny 10065 telephone: (212) 628-0700
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IFAF Round-up:Master Drawings Roundup 17/04/2009 11:49 Page 2
The International Fine Art Fair | 1st - 5th May 2009 The Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, New York | www.haughton.com/international-fairs
A view of Agrigento, by Jean-Charles-Joseph Remond (1795–1875). Signed lower left: ‘Remond/1821’. Oil on canvas, 29.5 by 43 cm. DIDIER AARON, INC., NEW YORK A woman in a hat shop, by Jean-Emile Laboureur (1877–1943). 1912. Watercolour, heightened with gouache, ink and grey wash on green paper, 27.9 by 30.7 cm. HILL-STONE INC., NEW YORK
The adoration of the Magi, by Battista Dossi (1475–1548). Oil on panel, 54.6 by 68.6 cm. MORETTI SRL, FLORENCE, LONDON AND NEW YORK
A day at the beach, by Jean-François Raffaelli (1850–1924). Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 70 by 91 cm. DAPHNE ALAZRAKI FINE ART, NEW YORK
Kakis III, by Alexander Calder. 1969. Gouache and ink on paper, 74.3 by 110 cm. VINCENT VALLARINO FINE ART LTD, NEW YORK
Mother and child I, by Egon Schiele (1890–1918). c.1909/10. Oil on canvas, 57.7 by 50.7 cm. WIENERROITHER & KOHLBACHER, VIENNA
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Master of Attel (active in Munich 1470/1480). Crowning with Thorns. Deposition. Ascension of Christ. Pentecost. Oil on panel, 125 x 116 cm (each)
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BARBARA HEPWORTH 1903–1975 Stringed Figure (Curlew), Version I, 1956 Brass and cotton string on wood veneer base 13a × 22 × 18 inches; 34 × 56 × 46 cm
MAY.Contents:cont.nov.pp.corr
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VOLUME CLI • NUMBER
1274
• MAY
2009
EXHIBITIONS
EDITORIAL
327
283 Le dix-neuvième siècle
Van Dyck and Britain by ELIZABETH HONIG
329
ARTICLES
Le Corbusier by COLIN AMERY
284 French artists and the Meyrick armoury by STEPHEN
DUFFY
331
Constable Portraits
332
Treasures of the Black Death
by HUGH BELSEY
293 Friendship in the Romantic studio: Charles-Emile Champmartin’s ‘Portrait of Eugène Delacroix and Alphonse Vée’ by JOHN P . LAMBERTSON
p.294
by JOHN CHERRY
333
David Cox by RICHARD GREEN
298 Jean-François Millet’s ‘Waiting’: a ‘realist’ religious painting by SIMON
KELLY
Giorgio de Chirico
336
Jan Lievens
by SILVIA LORETI
306 ‘Dans un café’, ‘Zigzags’ and five recovered Impressionist drawings by RICHARD
334
by ANNE T. WOOLLETT KENDALL
338
312 Symbolism, Decadence and Gustave Moreau by PETER
by ROGER CARDINAL
COOKE
340 342 and
Brücke by ROBIN REISENFELD
319 Michael Levey (1927–2008) RICHARD SHONE
Futurism by CHRIS MICHAELIDES
p.309 OBITUARY
by
Giacometti and Egypt
MARTIN WYLD
344
Gustave Caillebotte
345
Film and video
by FELIX KRÄMER
LETTERS
by MORGAN FALCONER
320 Lusieri not Hackert by
347
AIDAN WESTON - LEWIS
by RACHEL SLOAN
321 Picasso and the sight-size technique by NICHOLAS
BEER
and
JOAN P . URANECK
Edvard Munch
348
Wu Guanzhong by DAVID CARRIER and LIU HAIPING
p.348
321 Mondrian and the Vereniging Rembrandt by PETER
HECHT
BOOKS
322
350
CALENDAR
356
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Peintures françaises du XVIIIe siècle. Catalogue raisonné. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours. Château d’Azay-le-Ferron, S. Join-Lambert by CHRISTOPH MARTIN VOGTHERR
322
Liotard, M. Roethlisberger and R. Loche by NEIL JEFFARES
323
Chains. David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Post revolutionary France, S. Padiyar
324
Ingres, A. Carrington Shelton
p.332
by PHILIPPE BORDES
Brussels tapestry in the seventeenth century The furnishing of the French ambassador’s residence in London in the 1780s
by RICHARD WRIGLEY
325 325
The June issue is devoted to decorative arts including articles on:
Delacroix et la photographie, C. Leribault, ed. by JON WHITELEY
The Wordsworth Memorial, Grasmere, by Thomas Woolner
Joseph Blanc (1846–1904), peintre d’histoire et décorateur, P. Sérié
Duveen’s frames The Baroque exhibition reviewed
by PETER COOKE
p.349
326
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
Cover illustration: The floor scrapers, by Gustave Caillebotte. 1876. Canvas, 80 by 100 cm. (Private collection). Illustrated in this issue on p.309.
MAY.Masthead:Masthead
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VOLUME CLI • NUMBER
1274
• MAY
2009
Editor: Richard Shone
Managing Director: Kate Trevelyan
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Contributing Institutions The Art Institute of Chicago The Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute The Cleveland Museum of Art The Frick Collection The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Kimbell Art Museum The Metropolitan Museum of Art Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London © The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in England by Butler, Tanner & Dennis Printers, Somerset. ISSN 0007 6287
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Editorial
the study of nineteenth-century French art has changed almost beyond recognition may be judged by a comparison between the present issue and this Magazine’s first special issue on the subject, published in June 1938. The latter carries a self-congratulatory Editorial on the affirmative role played by the Burlington in the acceptance in England of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, well ahead of ‘official and academic opinion’. The two main articles are extraordinarily broad-brushed: Douglas Cooper surveys French portraiture from Neo-classicism to Cézanne; and a young John Rewald writes on ‘Camille Pissarro: His Work and Influence’. A more focused note is struck by D.S. MacColl defending Jacques-Louis David against English indifference; there is a useful summary of works by Degas in American collections; and a flamboyant article by Michel Florisoone on the rise of the individual temperament versus the claims of ‘collectivism’ and universal taste. In the current issue, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are scarcely glimpsed and single works of art are the focus of three of the articles. What provides continuity, however, is that the chief authors (with the exception of Florisoone) both in 1938 and in the pages that follow are British or American. Although the Burlington receives contributions from French writers, they are rarely on dix-neuvième subjects, which was not the case in the Magazine’s earliest years. This shift to a mostly Anglo-American scholarly concentration (already beginning in the late 1930s) came about in the 1950s and 1960s. The story goes something like this. Nineteenth-century French artists had friends and sympathetic critics who, as Vasaris of the ateliers, published memoirs and personal biographical studies. From them we obtain much detail of character, working habits and social ambience (Henri Delaborde’s Ingres and Alfred Sensier’s Millet are typical ‘life-and-works’ of this kind); and occasionally some valuable obiter dicta are offered (as in Emile Bernard’s and Ambroise Vollard’s studies of Cézanne). A little later a few short monographs are followed by œuvre catalogues (a grand tradition continued by Wildenstein). For general studies of the period – readable, opinionated and straying little beyond the high road from David to Cézanne, even positively ignoring the byways – the general public between the wars had works by, among others, R.H. Wilenski, Clive Bell and James Laver – an appreciative cross-Channel phalanx – to satisfy the growing appetite for this astonishingly rich century. French studies of the period were, generally speaking, poetic, formalist or documentary, sometimes all unhappily merged together; they were rarely freshly interpretative (Pierre Francastel was an exception; and so too, at times, was Elie Faure). Then came John Rewald, German-born, to be sure, but, from 1941, an American citizen. His documentary approach, carried out with Teutonic thoroughness in Third Republic France, led to his celebrated History of Impressionism (1946), a work that had
no parallel in French writing on the subject. He was a renowned sleuther and recorder, catching much elusive material on the wing, from the friends and descendants of his protagonists, which was then woven into a lucid narrative. Later writers, often with very different views, were beholden to him for this massive foundation stone of fact (and that of his pendant volume on PostImpressionism of 1956). For a while Rewald’s progressive, modernist agenda held sway (as did his friend Alfred Barr’s for twentieth-century art). ‘He was’, as Joseph Rishel wrote, ‘completely unsympathetic to revisionist art history’.1 In later years he deplored the increasing scholarly burrowings among French provincial worthies and the dead wood of forgotten Salon painters. And while by no means insensible to the social and political complexities of the age about which he wrote, the new art history was not for him. It should not be forgotten that in the popularising decade of the 1950s, someone as eminent as Rewald had no hesitation in contributing to the several cheaply available series of books on art and artists. In these, plates of uncertain colour replaced the black-and-whites of such earlier series as the Studio’s ‘World Masters’ or Lund Humphries’s ‘Gallery Books’. The Fontana Pocket Library of Great Art published its first twelve volumes in the mid-1950s, eight of them being devoted to French nineteenth-century art; among the authors were Rewald, Robert Goldwater and Sam Hunter. The texts are notable for insight and information, in contrast to earlier French pocket series such as Braun’s Collection des Maîtres in which flowery exegesis was often the norm. For readers now of a certain age, these series (and later ones from Phaidon including, for example, John Richardson’s Manet, and Thames & Hudson’s World of Art, including Frank Elgar’s Vincent van Gogh, both books from 1958) provided a reliable first taste of the French nineteenth century. Noticeably, however, there was very little on Cassatt or Morisot; nothing on Puvis or Moreau. And one could scarcely find references to gender and sexuality, class and prostitution, landscape and nationalism or an analysis of inland waterway traffic in the Ile de France. From the late 1960s and 1970s scholarship in the hands of American and British historians of the nineteenth century turned away from the suave survey and the ‘bourgeois’ monograph to the highly particularised examination of context and reception (George Heard Hamilton’s 1954 Manet and His Critics was a notable early example of reception history). Pioneers such as T.J. Clark and Linda Nochlin were followed in this search for creative alternatives by a host of academics and museum curators who have investigated every aspect of the century from Neo-classical homoeroticism to Post-Impressionist misogyny, usually with fruitful, but sometimes with bizarre, results (few will forget the vision of Mme Cézanne’s breasts floating as clouds above Mont Sainte-Victoire). In France, such interpretative literature has been minimal against a continuing backdrop of catalogues raisonnés, exhibition histories, connoisseurship and editions of letters and writings. The intellectual shortcomings in much French academic art history were recognised in France itself when the Institut national de l’Histoire d’Art (INHA) was finally inaugurated in 2005, in part to combat this narrowness of approach.2 We have yet to see the positive results of this incentive and can only hope that when they materialise the Burlington will be a beneficiary.
1
2
Le dix-neuvième siècle JUST HOW MUCH
J.J. Rishel: Obituary of John Rewald, pp.317–18.
THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE
136 (1994),
For the INHA, see the Editorial in ibid., 148 (2006), p.311.
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French artists and the Meyrick armoury by STEPHEN DUFFY
IN 2003 THE Wallace Collection’s library received an unexpected but very welcome gift from Daphne Lucas, a great admirer of Richard Parkes Bonington who had formed an archive of material relating to the painter’s life. This gift was the visitors’ book for the armoury of Dr Samuel Rush Meyrick covering the period 1820 to 1830. As Mrs Lucas was well aware, she could not have found a more appropriate home for the book than the Wallace Collection. Not only does it own an outstanding group of paintings and watercolours by Bonington, but it also has much of the collection of arms and armour that Meyrick once proudly displayed at his houses in London and Herefordshire. It has long been known that Bonington and Delacroix visited Meyrick’s armoury in July 1825 from the sketches they drew there and from a letter written much later by Delacroix to the critic Théophile Thoré. It is therefore no surprise that both men appear in the visitors’ book. But, as will be seen, this slim volume with sixty-five pages of names and addresses contains much more of interest to scholars of French and British art in the early nineteenth century.1 Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848; Fig.1) was the father of the systematic study of arms and armour. A barrister, with a doctorate in civil law, he was knighted by William IV in 1832 for his services in arranging the armouries at Windsor Castle and the Tower of London in a manner which for the first time showed an awareness of armour’s historical development.2 The author of A Critical Enquiry into Antient Armour as it existed in Europe but particularly England from the Norman Conquest to the reign of King Charles II (1824), a work which won him an international reputation, he also assembled a large collection of arms and armour, some acquired from his father, but most bought from the dealers Paul and Dominic Colnaghi and from an antiquarian of Welsh origins like himself, Thomas Gwennap. The money to buy these pieces came in fact from his son, Llewelyn, because Samuel had been disinherited by his father after his marriage in 1803, and Samuel was always careful to describe the collection as Llewelyn’s – the reason no doubt why the visitors’ book is titled ‘Visitors to the Armoury of Llewelyn Meyrick Esqr. LL.B.’. But, as the collection was arranged by Samuel (whose son predeceased him in 1837) and he probably took the leading role in its formation, it was, and has remained, conventional for others to refer to it as Samuel’s. It was displayed, first at his London house at 20 Upper Cadogan Place (after a brief spell at 3 Sloane Terrace, Chelsea), and then, after 1830, at his newly built castle in Herefordshire, Goodrich Court. It is the ten years before the move to Herefordshire that are covered by the book now in the Wallace Collection.3
Regrettably there seems to be no illustration of the interior of 20 Upper Cadogan Place in Meyrick’s time. Even written descriptions are rare, although Meyrick’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine described his collection as filling ‘the garrets, the staircase and the back drawing-room’ of the house and even encroaching ‘upon the bedrooms’.4 And in 1868 Robert Curzon, later Lord Zouche, remembered that ‘the house was full of armour, from top to bottom[;] his [Meyrick’s] own bedroom & stair case was crammed with arms. On washing my hands in the bedroom, I opened the wardrobe to look for a towel, but there was nothing but a bronze Greek helmet, and other such antient clothing’.5 The contents of the armoury, however, can be studied, not only from the drawings made by visiting artists, but from the survival of many of the pieces in the Wallace Collection and elsewhere and from two handsome folio volumes published in 1830: Engraved Illustrations of Antient Arms and Armour, from the Collection of Llewelyn Meyrick LLB, FSA, After the Drawings and with the Descriptions of Dr Meyrick, by Joseph Skelton FSA (previously issued in parts, beginning in 1826). Meyrick was a sociable man with a wide circle of friends mostly acquired through his antiquarian interests, which extended to heraldry as well as arms and armour. In the visitors’ book heraldry features through the presence of drawings of coats of arms in pencil and watercolour next to many of the entries, perhaps in part the work of Samuel himself.6 The fame of his collection ensured that he had many visitors, and, in all, the names of nearly twelve hundred people appear in the book, although this cannot be a complete record of all the visits the armoury received. Some of his friends are not included, and he clearly had a policy of allowing only one entry per visitor – hardly any name appears more than once. Unfortunately only a few of the entries are dated, but it is usually possible to establish an approximate date for a visit from the placement of the entry – until 1826 whenever the top of a right-hand page was begun in a new year, an indication of the year was made there – and from external evidence the timescale can sometimes be narrowed still further. Yet it must be acknowledged that the scarcity of securely dated visits is sometimes frustrating, and occasionally, as perhaps this article will demonstrate only too well, it invites speculation which only the discovery of more information will either prove or disprove. Appropriately the book begins with Meyrick’s patron George IV (Fig.2), followed soon after by Sir Walter Scott, the two men who between them set the tone for that romanticised view of the medieval past that Meyrick’s own collection and studies so perfectly exemplified. Most of the visitors are now totally unknown, but Scott is followed by other writers
For their invaluable assistance I would like to thank Stephen Bann, Tobias Capwell, Sophie Eloy, Elodie Goëssant, Rosalind Lowe, Patrick Noon, Edward Nygren, Ferdinand Pajor, Stuart Pyhrr, Jeremy Warren and Linda Whiteley. 1 A transcription of the book can be found on the Wallace Collection’s website, www.wallacecollection.org/learning/research. Mrs Lucas bought the visitors’ book, with an unknown provenance, at a books and manuscripts sale, Phillips, Son & Neale,
London, 1st October 1981, lot 294. 2 On Meyrick, see R. Lowe: Sir Samuel Meyrick and Goodrich Court, Almeley 2003; and C. Wainwright: The Romantic Interior. The British Collector at Home 1750–1850, New Haven and London 1989, pp.241–68. 3 There are three visitors’ books for Goodrich Court at Leeds, Royal Armouries Library, RAR.0087 (S. Meyrick Box 1).
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2. Page 1 of ‘Visitors to the Armoury of Llewelyn Meyrick Esqr. LL.B.’, 1820–30. (Hertford House Historic Collection, Wallace Collection, London).
1. Samuel Rush Meyrick, by Henry Perronet Briggs. 1826. Canvas, 126.4 by 100.5 cm. (Torre Abbey Historic House and Gallery, Torquay).
(including Harrison Ainsworth and Captain Marryat) and, besides artists, there are architects (C.R. Cockerell and William Wilkins), dealers (the Colnaghis and the Woodburns) and art collectors (Sir Abraham Hume and Lord Farnborough). Another collector, Meyrick’s close friend Francis Douce, is joined by many of his fellow antiquarians, and not surprisingly military men figure prominently, as do members of Meyrick’s own profession, the law. In the 1820s more than fifty British artists, including Landseer, Wilkie, Phillips, Hilton, Haydon, J.F. Lewis, C.R. Leslie and William Allan, visited the collection. Although it is hardly surprising that there were few specialists in landscape or portraiture – so no Turner, Constable or Lawrence – many of the leading historical painters can be found, and the knowledge that they saw the armoury should lead anyone studying their works that feature arms and armour to look for correspondences with objects from the Meyrick collection. Meyrick himself was always keen to stress its value for artists treating historical themes. In 1826 in a puff for Skelton’s illustrations written for the Gentleman’s Magazine he proclaimed in a characteristically forthright manner that:
4
Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1848), p.92. Meyrick Society archives quoted in Lowe, op. cit. (note 2), p.78. 6 A note on page 21, ‘Colour to here H C Moffatt. Sept 2nd 1872’, implies that at least some of the watercolour additions are much later. (Moffatt was the son of George Moffatt who bought Goodrich Court in 1871.) Meyrick’s edition 5
To Artists, it appears to me, the work will be invaluable; for there now exists a feeling for correctness of costume and accessaries [sic], both here and on the Continent, in painting and on the stage, that cannot retrograde [sic]. The taste with the publick is in its commencement, but it is daily gaining ground, and when once they have become confident judges in these matters, they will no longer tolerate anachronisms. Foreigners and natives are continually drawing from my son’s collection; and at least six pictures, painted by as many of the English who stand at the head of their profession, will grace the walls of the ensuing exhibition at Somerset-house. These paintings have been ordered by the first among our nobility who patronize the arts, and all the authors of them declare that they never could have satisfactorily performed their engagements without access to this collection.7 The boast that artists were ‘continually’ drawing from the collection was no doubt exaggerated, but it is clear that the armoury attracted much interest within the artistic community. Of the dozen or so French painters who visited, so far it has not been possible to trace more than a few of their works that incorporate studies made from Meyrick’s collection. More rewarding is the biographical light it throws – as will be seen, in several cases scholars have not only been unaware until now that these artists saw the Meyrick armoury, but even that they were in England at the time revealed by the book. No doubt our previous ignorance of these visits can be explained in part by the rapid development of communications between England and France after the Napoleonic wars. There are probably few Continental visits by major British artists which are unknown even if they are not
of Heraldic Visitations of Wales [. . .] by Lewis Dwnn, Llandovery 1846, contained before each family’s description a blank shield ‘to enable the possessors of the volumes to insert the armorial bearings and add the crests’; Lowe, op. cit. (note 2), p.197. 7 Gentleman’s Magazine (April 1826), p.319.
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always well documented, but of course it was no more difficult for French artists to come to London than it was for English artists to visit Paris – a regular steamship service between Calais and Dover was operating from 1818, supplementing a small fleet of boats that was already conveying travellers back and forth across the Channel.8 Thus it was so easy to go from Paris to London (compared with, say, from Paris to Rome) that a visit by a French artist to London was sometimes unknown to later commentators or even forgotten or misdated by the travellers themselves.9 For French artists there were opportunities to study medieval armour in France, particularly at the Musée de l’Artillerie in the place Saint-Thomas d’Aquin in Paris.10 Delacroix for one probably made studies there.11 Nevertheless, it was Delacroix himself who described Meyrick’s armoury (with pardonable exaggeration) as ‘la plus belle collection d’armures qui ait peut-être existé’,12 and it is clear that the fame of the collection, much enhanced by Meyrick’s promotional skills, made it one of the sights of London.13 The time spent in England by the first major French artist to be listed in the book, Théodore Gericault, has always been acknowledged as profoundly influential on his life and art. It is therefore a valuable, though small, addition to our meagre knowledge of his English sojourns to know that he visited the Meyrick armoury.14 His entry, ‘M. Gericault à Paris’ appears almost at the top of page 4 of the book, indicating that he went there during his first extended visit to England which lasted from 10th/11th April to 18th/19th June 1820.15 He was accompanied by the Rochard brothers, Simon-Jacques and François Théodore, fellow artists (although of miniature painting), at least one of whom, Simon-Jacques, had been established in London for several years.16 It has long been known from C.R. Cockerell’s diary that Gericault and Simon-Jacques Rochard were acquainted with one another during Gericault’s later English visit, which lasted almost the whole of 1821,17 but this seems to be the first indication that they were on familiar terms before then. Between the names of the Rochards and Gericault are two others – the Revd James Raine (1791–1858), a teacher, antiquary and topographer who was librarian of Durham Cathedral, and Colonel Charles Philippe de Bosset (1773–1845) of Neuchâtel in Switzerland who had been an officer in the British army from 1796 to 1818. Although Cockerell himself is not listed in the visitors’ book until 1822, he may have been the link between all
five of these men. Raine and Cockerell had antiquarian interests in common; and de Bosset had corresponded with Cockerell when he was governor of the island of Cephalonia (1810–14) at the time when Cockerell was engaged in his pioneering architectural and archaeological studies in Greece.18 De Bosset had also been in Rome in December 1816, when Gericault was there, although there is no evidence that they met then.19 It is generally accepted, however, that Gericault first met Cockerell during his stay in Rome between November 1816 and September 1817.20 Immediately above the entry for Simon-Jacques Rochard are the names of four visitors, two English, Richard Lechmere and Major Hamilton Smith, and two French: ‘M. Perignon à Paris. Ecole des droits’ (the first French name in the book) and ‘M. Pierret Conseiller à la Cour des Comptes à Paris’. Lechmere remains unknown to art history, but Major Charles Hamilton Smith (1776–1859) was much more than just a military man. A friend of Meyrick’s, he was an antiquary, naturalist and amateur artist who apparently would sketch almost everything he saw.21 It is intriguing to see the names of Gericault, the consummate draughtsman of lions and horses, so close to that of Hamilton Smith, who made thousands of studies of plants and animals – suggesting that this may have been one of those trans-national connections, no matter how brief, that were common at the time but have so often gone unrecorded. ‘Perignon’ is perhaps a member of the family which included the painter and auctioneer Alexis Nicolas le jeune (1785–1864) and the painter Alexis Joseph (1806–82).22 The founder of this family of artists, Alexis Nicolas le vieux (1726–82), had been a notary as well as a painter and engraver.23 ‘Pierret’ is presumably the ‘Pierret fils’ who is listed in the 1820 and 1821 editions of the Almanach des 25000 principaux habitans de Paris as a ‘réf[érendaire] à la cour des comptes’ as living at 68 rue St-André-des-Arts, although curiously there is a pencil annotation in the visitors’ book ‘No 3. Rue de l’Odeon [sic]’ next to his entry. Perhaps he was related to the Pierret brothers, Claude and Jean Baptiste, both administrators, the latter of whom was a great friend of Delacroix.24 Medieval subjects were not a conspicuous part of Gericault’s art, but that he studied medieval armour is evident from several of his sketches and at least one associated lithograph. His biographer Charles Clément also stated that Gericault studied armour in the Tower of London: he knew of ‘cinq dessins, cavaliers et armures, fait dans la Tour de Londres’ by Gericault which in his time were in the Binder collection.25 These are now unidentified, and in the present state of knowledge they cannot be used to confirm
8 P. Unwin: The Narrow Sea, London 2003, p.186; M. Pointon: The Bonington Circle. English Watercolour and Anglo-French Landscape 1790–1855, Brighton 1985, pp.25–31 and 38, discusses travel by artists between England and France, even during the Napoleonic wars. 9 On Franco-British artistic relations after the Napoleonic wars, see ibid.; P. Noon et al.: exh. cat. Constable to Delacroix. British Art and the French Romantics, London (Tate) 2003; and E. Morris: French Art and Nineteenth-Century Britain, New Haven and London 2005. 10 See S.W. Pyhrr: ‘From Revolution to Romanticism: France and the collecting of arms and armour in the early 19th century’, in R.D. Smith, ed.: ICOMAM 50. Papers on arms and military history 1957–2007, Leeds 2007. 11 See L. Johnson: The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix. A Critical Catalogue, Oxford 1981, I, pp.187 and (as a doubtful work) 224; another study of armour (not from Meyrick’s collection) by Delacroix in oil on paper is currently with Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York. 12 A. Joubin: Correspondance Générale d’Eugène Delacroix, Paris 1935, IV, p.287 (from the letter to Thoré of 30th November 1861). 13 On the attractions of London, of which Meyrick’s armoury was one, see R.D. Altick: The Shows of London, Cambridge MA and London 1978; see also C. Fox, ed.:
London – World City 1800–1840, New Haven and London 1982, esp. pp.418–46. 14 For the documentary evidence of Gericault’s English visits, the first of which was a brief excursion in March 1819, see G. Bazin: Théodore Géricault. Etude Critique, Documents et Catalogue Raisonné, Paris 1987, I, pp.42 and 51–65; and B. Chenique: ‘Gericault: Une Vie’, in S. Laveissière and R. Michel: exh. cat. Gericault, Paris (Grand Palais) 1991–92, pp.261–308. 15 The first right-hand page of the book to bear the date 1821 is page 7. 16 Simon-Jacques first exhibited at the Royal Academy, London (from 155 New Bond Street), in 1816; his brother in 1820. Simon-Jacques painted a portrait of Llewelyn Meyrick which is now lost; see Lowe, op. cit. (note 2), p.144. 17 L. Johnson: ‘Géricault and Delacroix seen by Cockerell’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 113 (1971), pp.548–54. 18 See Eretria. A Guide to the Ancient City (Ecole Suisse d’Archéologie en Grèce), Fribourg 2004, p.58; de Bosset is often mentioned in Cockerell’s 1821 diary (the earliest of his to survive), London, Victoria and Albert Museum, RIBA Library, COC\9\2 (box 9). De Bosset’s justificatory Parga and the Ionian Islands; comprehending a Refutation of the Various Mis-Statements on the Subject . . . was published by Rodwell and Martin, London, in 1822, the year after they had published Gericault’s great series of English lithographs, Various Subjects drawn from Life and on Stone.
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3. Study of armour for man and horse, by Théodore Gericault. 1820. Graphite, 20.3 by 14.2 cm. (Kunsthalle, Bremen).
4. Armour for man and horse, by Hans Ringler. c.1532–36. (Wallace Collection, London).
that Gericault sketched armour in the Tower.26 On the other hand, Germain Bazin, in his catalogue raisonné of Gericault’s works, includes six studies of mounted knights which can be identified as after two composite armours for man and horse that were once owned by Meyrick – four after an armour which is now (with a different horse mount) in the Wallace Collection (Figs.3 and 4), and two after another now divided between Eastnor and Warwick Castles.27 It would be pleasing for the purposes of this article if it could be demonstrated that Gericault had sketched these subjects when he saw Meyrick’s armoury at Cadogan Place, but in fact neither was then in Meyrick’s collection – both were probably acquired by him much later.28 Instead Gericault must have drawn them when they were shown
in an exhibition promoted by Meyrick’s friend Thomas Gwennap at the Gothic Hall in Opera House Colonnade, Pall Mall, which had opened in 1818.29 Earlier they had been acquired from Napoleon’s collection by William Bullock and displayed by him and Gwennap at the ‘Oplotheca’ (an Anglicisation of the Greek word for armoury) at 20 Lower Brook Street. An aquatint of 1816 shows the display at the Oplotheca with the armour later owned by Meyrick and the Wallace Collection clearly visible in the left mid-distance and the other armour on the far left (Fig.5). That they were displayed in a similar manner at the Oplotheca and the Gothic Hall is suggested by the view in Gericault’s sketches being in each case from the same side as in the print. He made use of his studies of the horse armour now at Warwick
19
(opened 1828), where Gericault may have made such drawings of lions as ibid., nos.2327 and 2328, but perhaps these drawings were made at Exeter ’Change [sic] on the Strand, where it was also possible to study lions, as Landseer did. 27 Bazin, op. cit. (note 14), VII, pp.162–63, nos.2377–82. He justifiably casts doubt on some of these attributions, but even if none of them was by Gericault the lithograph Lara blessé (Fig.6), which is incontestably by him, would demonstrate that Gericault studied the horse armour now at Warwick Castle; see also ibid., VII, p.43, for a lost painting of a knight in armour attributed to Gericault. 28 They were illustrated by Skelton as plates VII–IX of the third volume of Meyrick’s unpublished catalogue of his collection at Goodrich Court (London, Wallace Collection, Meyrick Archive) as the armours of ‘Albert IVth Duke of Bavaria A.D. 1500’ (the armour now at Warwick and Eastnor Castles) and of ‘William IVth Duke of Bavaria A.D. 1532’ (now in the Wallace Collection; A29). The Wallace Collection’s armour was lot 155 in the [Gwennap] sale, London, G. Robins, 10th and 11th June 1833; see J. Mann: Wallace Collection Catalogues. European Arms and Armour, London 1962, I, pp.31–32; and A.V.B. Norman: Wallace Collection Catalogues. European Arms and Armour Supplement, London 1986, pp.9–10. 29 Printed catalogues indicate that it later transferred to the ‘Royal Armoury’ in the Haymarket, London (next to the Theatre Royal), probably in 1821.
De Bosset, op. cit. (note 18), p.6. L. Eitner: Géricault. His Life and Work, London 1983, p.106; and Laveissière and Michel, op. cit. (note 14), p.278. 21 Meyrick and Hamilton Smith were the joint authors of The Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Islands and the adjacent Coasts of the Baltic, London 1815, in two volumes with illustrations by Hamilton Smith; on Hamilton Smith, see the entry in H. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds.: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 2004, vol.51, pp.65–66. 22 There is a Perignon listed in the Almanach des 25000 principaux habitans de Paris for 1820 and 1821 as ‘avocat à la cour royale, membre du conseil général du département et du conseil d’administration de la société d’encouragement’, but he seems too grand for someone (a student?) who gives his address as simply ‘Ecole des droits’. 23 On the Perignons see Dictionary of Artists, Paris 2006, vol.10, pp.1171–72. 24 On the Pierrets, see Johnson, op. cit. (note 11), I, p.44, no.67. 25 C. Clément: Géricault. Etude Biographique et Critique, Paris 1879, p.363, note 1. 26 In fact the belief that Gericault sketched lions at the ‘London zoo’ (Eitner, op. cit. (note 20), p.234; and Bazin, op. cit. (note 14), VII, pp.31–34) similarly needs qualifying. There was actually no such institution when Gericault was in London. There was a menagerie at the Tower of London, which formed the basis of the London Zoo 20
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Castle for his lithograph Lara blessé, a subject from Byron, which was published first by Mme Delpech soon after his return from France (Fig.6).30 Given his passion for horses, it was perhaps inevitable that his interest in armour, brief though it was, was centred on its use for both man and horse. Gericault came to London in 1820 to oversee the exhibition of his Raft of the Medusa (Musée du Louvre, Paris) at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The proprietor of the Hall was William Bullock, with whom soon after his arrival he agreed a contract to display the painting in return for one third of the proceeds. Bullock was well known to Meyrick as a dealer and from his activities at the Egyptian Hall where, since 1812, he had mounted an extraordinary array of eclectic, often sensationalist, exhibitions of fine art, arms and armour, historical items and ‘natural curiosities’ which had often attracted crowds in their thousands.31 Bullock was one of the earliest visitors to the armoury – his entry (preceded by that of Sir Walter Scott) appears near the top of the second page. Perhaps it was on the recommendation of Bullock that Gericault and his friends visited Meyrick’s armoury shortly afterwards. While in England Gericault paid close attention to British art, soon revising his early unenthusiastic impressions and developing an appreciation of British ‘colour and effect [which] are understood and felt only here’, as he wrote to Horace Vernet.32 Two of the artists who particularly attracted his attention were Landseer and Wilkie, and it is intriguing to note that their names
appear soon after Gericault’s entry in the book – to be precise fourteen and sixteen places later. They probably visited with Abraham Cooper (1787–1868), an artist never known to have been mentioned by Gericault, but someone who would surely have interested him as a fellow horse and battle painter. His name appears twelve places after that of Gericault. At the very least the proximity of these names suggests the smallness of the London art world and the ease with which it would have been possible for artists to meet one another. It is known from Cockerell’s diary that Gericault visited Wilkie in his studio on 1st December 1821 to see Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo (Apsley House, London), but there is evidence, again from the letter to Vernet, that he had seen Wilkie’s studio at least once before then. In that letter, dated 6th May (probably 1820),33 he particularly singled out for praise Wilkie, Landseer and James Ward (of whom more later). Presumably it is only by chance that the names of Gericault, Wilkie and Landseer appear so close together in the book, but one cannot be certain, and it is entirely possible that Gericault became acquainted with Landseer as well as Wilkie either before or soon after they all visited the Meyrick armoury.34 When Gericault saw Wilkie’s picture with Cockerell in December 1821 they were accompanied by Jules-Robert Auguste (1789–1850), a well-travelled artist of independent means, usually referred to simply as ‘Monsieur Auguste’, who was also on friendly terms with many other artists, including, later, Delacroix and Bonington. During an extended tour of the Near East he had assembled a large collection of costumes, arms and armour and decorative objects which he generously allowed others to study.35 Resident in London in the early 1820s, he too is listed in the visitors’ book – on 29th September 1822, the only visit by a French artist to be precisely dated. There is only one other entry for that day – ‘J. Wade of Injebreck Isle of Man’, a country gentleman who was presumably a student of arms and armour but whose interest in the arts seems otherwise to have gone unrecorded. Perhaps the most surprising discovery from the visitors’ book is the visit made by three French artists – Paul Delaroche, Hippolyte Bellangé and Eugène Lami – probably in late spring or early summer 1822. Although all three were to be the subject of biographical studies after their deaths, none of their biographers makes any reference to their stay in London at this time.36 Fledgling history painters in their early twenties, they were accompanied by two Englishmen, the painter James Ward and the sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt, both much older men who were established figures in the London art world. Bellangé, a devoted Bonapartist, was to dedicate himself almost exclusively to French themes, but both Lami and Delaroche were soon to become
30 E. Brugerolles, ed.: exh. cat. Gericault. Dessins & estampes des collections de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) and Cambridge (Fitzwilliam Museum) 1997–99, p.232; F. Bergot: exh. cat. Géricault. Tout l’œuvre gravé et pièces en rapport, Rouen (Musée des Beaux-Arts) 1981–82, pp.50–51; cf. Eitner, op. cit. (note 20), p.260. 31 On Bullock see C. Riding, in Noon et al., op. cit. (note 9), pp.66–93; and S. Pearce: ‘William Bullock. Collections and exhibitions at the Egyptian Hall, London, 1816–25’, Journal of the History of Collections 20/1 (2008), pp.17–35. 32 Eitner, op. cit. (note 20), p.218. 33 See Laveissière and Michel, op. cit. (note 14), pp.291–92. 34 Gericault clearly knew more about Landseer than just his paintings as he told Vernet that Landseer was eighteen years old; see Eitner, op. cit. (note 20), p.218. 35 On Auguste, see D.A. Rosenthal: ‘Ingres, Géricault and “Monsieur Auguste”’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 124 (1982), pp.9–14; and P. Noon: exh. cat. Richard
Parkes Bonington. ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, New Haven (Yale Center for British Art) and Paris (Petit Palais) 1991–92, p.174. 36 H. Delaborde and J. Goddé: Oeuvre de Paul Delaroche, Paris 1858; J. Adeline: Hippolyte Bellangé, Paris 1880; and P.-A. Lemoisne: Eugène Lami 1800–1890, Paris 1912. 37 Delaborde and Goddé, op. cit. (note 36), p.14; and Illustrated London News (5th February 1848). 38 Lami had been a pupil of Gericault’s friend Horace Vernet with whom he had collaborated on illustrative projects with military and literary subjects (Lemoisne, op. cit. (note 36), p.13; and Noon, op. cit. (note 35), p.86); Delaroche is said to have met Gericault after Gericault had praised Delaroche’s Joas rescued by Josabeth at the 1822 Paris Salon; see S. Bann: Paul Delaroche. History Painted, London 1997, p.53. 39 Other earlier visitors to England who may have helped or encouraged them with their visit include Charles Nodier, author of Promenade de Dieppe aux Montagnes d’Ecosse (1821) and even the duc d’Orléans, a former exile in England, whose wife
5. The interior of the Oplotheca in Brook Street, by S. Mitan and T. Sutherland after W.M. Craig. 1816. Aquatint, 18.1 by 27 cm. (Library, Wallace Collection, London).
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closely associated with English subjects. It has long been known that Lami was in England in the 1820s, not least from his twelve lithographs, Souvenirs de Londres, published in 1826, but until the discovery of the visitors’ book the only references to the presence of Delaroche in England in this decade (or indeed later) were a passing mention by his biographer Henri Delaborde of ‘une excursion de quelques jours à Londres en 1827’ and an anonymous statement in the Illustrated London News in 1848 that Delaroche had come to England to make studies for his Princes in the Tower (Les enfants d’Edouard) (Musée du Louvre, Paris), which he painted in 1830 and exhibited at the Salon of 1831.37 Given the anglophilia of many young French painters, it is perfectly possible that there are more journeys to England by major French artists in the 1820s to discover. But it is nevertheless extraordinary that, in the case of Delaroche, an artist who was soon to make for himself an unrivalled reputation as a painter of English historical subjects, his entry in Meyrick’s visitors’ book is at present the only incontrovertible evidence of such a visit by him. The visit or visits mentioned by Delaborde and the notice in the Illustrated London News may well have taken place – it is not unreasonable to suppose that such a devoted student of English history came several times to England in the 1820s – but the reliability of these sources is weakened by their brevity and by the fact that they were both written many years later. Delaroche, Bellangé and Lami had become friends as pupils in the studio of the history painter Antoine-Jean Gros, and doubtless they were drawn together by a shared aim to establish themselves as artists of historical, specifically non-classical, themes. At the time of their excursion to England Lami and Bellangé, if not Delaroche, were probably acquainted with Gericault,38 who would presumably have encouraged their visit, although Bellangé was particularly close to Charlet, who had crossed the Channel with Gericault in 1820, only to return soon afterwards, unimpressed by what he had seen.39 Perhaps they also received some encouragement from Bonington, who had also been among their companions in Gros’s studio. His omission from the group is presumably to be explained by his preference for landscape rather than figure painting at this stage of his career. Cotes Wyatt, after an early career as a decorative painter, was, by the beginning of the 1820s, a sculptor with major commissions for monuments to Princess Charlotte and her father George III.40 James Ward was a Royal Academician best known as a painter of landscapes and animals (but also a huge Allegory of Waterloo shown at the Egyptian Hall in 1821), although he had a second career as an engraver and etcher and in the 1820s he became an accomplished lithographer.41 Ward’s experience and contacts in the English print trade would no doubt have been useful to the young French painters,
had commissioned a Lamentation from Delaroche in 1820; see S. Bann: ‘Paul Delaroche’s Early Work in the Context of English History Painting’, Oxford Art Journal (2006), p.351. For John Arrowsmith’s Orléanist connections, see L. Whiteley, in J. Gage et al.: exh. cat. Constable. Le Choix de Lucian Freud, Paris (Grand Palais) 2002–03, p.48; for those of Horace Vernet, who had accompanied Gericault on his first brief visit to England in 1819, see Chenique in Laveissière and Michel, op. cit. (note 14), p.283; Vernet also had close Orléanist connections. 40 On Cotes Wyatt, see the entry in Matthew and Harrison, op. cit. (note 21), LX, pp.579–80. On the possible relevance of Cotes Wyatt’s work at Windsor Castle for Delaroche’s Cromwell and Charles I (exh. Salon of 1831; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes) and his unexecuted sculpture St George and the dragon of c.1829–30, see Bann, op. cit. (note 38), p.349. 41 On Ward, see the entry in Matthew and Harrison, op. cit. (note 21); and O. Beckett: The Life and Work of James Ward, R.A. 1769–1859. The Forgotten Genius,
6. Lara blessé, by Théodore Gericault. 1822. Lithograph, third state, 17.9 by 23 cm. (British Museum, London).
but otherwise it is difficult to discern a clear link between these two well-established English artists and their French colleagues at so early a stage in their development. It is possible that the Frenchmen had travelled to England on their own initiative, determined to study English art and history on native ground and armed with introductions to leading artists such as Ward and Cotes Wyatt. Perhaps, however, their presence in London may more accurately be explained by the entry, ‘John Arrowsmith Rue des Vinaigriers Paris’, almost immediately above their own names. A dealer in prints and pictures, French by nationality and upbringing despite his very English name, he is familiar to all historians of Constable from his purchase of The haywain (National Gallery, London), and other works by the English artist whom he introduced to French audiences in the mid1820s.42 He first appears in the Constable literature in early April 1822 when, after seeing The haywain at the British Institution, he tried to buy it at a price which the artist thought derisory. It was probably either during this trip to London, or on a slightly later visit that Arrowsmith saw the Meyrick armoury, probably with the young French artists. In the visitors’ book Delaroche gives his address as hôtel de la Rochefoucault, rue de Seine, and Bellangé gives his as 11 rue de l’Abbaye. In both cases these are the addresses which the artists used in the livret for the 1824 Salon, not the Salon of 1822. This suggests that their visit to England took place some time after the 1822 Salon was due to open, according to the livret, on 24th April (since it is unlikely they would have left Paris shortly before the Salon opened). That it
London 1995. I have consulted Ward’s sometimes illegible diary for the period September 1821 to September 1822 in the archives of the Royal Academy but could find no reference to his visit to the Meyrick armoury. 42 On Arrowsmith, see R.B. Beckett: John Constable’s Correspondence, Ipswich 1966, IV, pp.177–211; and Whiteley, in Gage et al., op. cit. (note 39), pp.47–51. The signature between Arrowsmith and the five artists is that of Colonel George James Reeves of the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Foot. Lemoisne, op. cit. (note 36), p.21, says that in 1826 Lami was helped in England by ‘un vieux colonel de l’armée anglaise’ who was ‘blessé dans les guerres de la Révolution’. Reeves (commissioned 1791; died 1845) was earlier in the 8th Foot, which had fought against French forces at the siege of Nijmegen in 1794, but whether he was wounded then is unknown (although he was certainly wounded during the Peninsular War). I am grateful to Major J.M. Dunlop (Ret’d) of the Inniskillings Museum for information about Reeves. the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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7. Joan of Arc in prison, by Paul Delaroche. 1824. Canvas, 277 by 217.5 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen).
was not much later in the year is suggested by the entries being towards the bottom of a left-hand page which is immediately followed by a page with the inscription ‘1822’ at the top (indicating, as explained above, that that was the year in which the top of that page was reached).43 Almost nothing is known of Arrowsmith’s activities before this encounter with Constable, but it seems logical to assume that at the very least the young artists were making use of his contacts and facility in French and English (such as it was) to assist them with their visit.44 Perhaps Arrowsmith had a financial arrangement with them which has not been recorded. He may simply have thought that Delaroche and his companions would benefit from exposure to the full range of English art, but he may also have had a plan to have them illustrate English themes
43 Lami may have visited the British Institution (opened 13th May 1822) at which Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s feast (National Gallery, London), was exhibited. He included a figure in his watercolour A supper during the régence (private collection) based on one in Rembrandt’s painting, though it was painted much later, in 1853; see J. Carey: Theatres of Life. Drawings from the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor, London 2007, pp.192–94. 44 Arrowsmith in fact spoke English with some difficulty (see R.B. Beckett, op. cit. (note 42), p.178), but surely his knowledge of the language was better than that of Lami, Bellangé or Delaroche. 45 Pointon, op. cit. (note 8), p.63. In London Cockerell (one of the artists who provided original drawings for the Voyage pittoresque en Sicile) sometimes dined with de Bosset and ‘d’Osterwald’ (presumably Jean-François), for example, on 25th May and 11th June 1821; see Cockerell’s diary cited at note 18 above. 46 L. Whiteley: ‘Painters and dealers in nineteenth-century France, 1820–1878, with special reference to the firm of Durand-Ruel’, D.Phil. diss. (University of Oxford, 1996), ch.3, p.15.
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through prints and paintings for the French market. The oils and watercolours for the Voyage pittoresque en Sicile by a group of young French, Swiss and British artists, which were exhibited by the editor Jean-François d’Ostervald at the Salon of 1822 under his own name, suggest one possibility for a speculative relationship of this kind.45 At present, however, there is no known connection between Arrowsmith and either Bellangé or Lami after their visit to London (apart from Arrowsmith’s ownership of a small picture, Le cuirassier (present whereabouts unknown) painted jointly by Lami and Delaroche).46 With Delaroche, however, a closer association developed, although it was to be short lived. Arrowsmith owned Delaroche’s Joan of Arc in prison (Fig.7), shown at the Paris Salon of 1824, as well as the reduced version of the composition on which S.W. Reynolds based his reproductive engraving, originally commissioned by Arrowsmith but published by Henry Rittner in 1829.47 Rittner had had some sort of loose partnership with Arrowsmith48 and may well have taken over responsibility for the engraving from him after he suffered financial problems in 1826. He also owned Delaroche’s lost painting Children surprised by a storm, an engraving of which (by George Maile) was also published by Arrowsmith, probably two or three years after it was painted in 1825.49 Although not specifically an English subject, in composition and sentiment it is a work which owes much to English art.50 It is possible that Children surprised by a storm and Joan of Arc in prison, which may be classed as Delaroche’s first English subject because it includes the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester, were ultimately the sole fruit of a more ambitious plan for Arrowsmith to utilise the talents of his three young compatriots. Before 1822 neither Lami nor Delaroche is known to have depicted English subjects, and such knowledge as they had of English art and literature would have been obtained largely from books and prints and from friends like Gericault and Bonington. According to Lami’s biographer, he went to London in 1826 because, encouraged by Bonington, he was ‘désireux de connaître Reynolds and Lawrence’,51 but, thanks to the visitors’ book, we now know that he may have seen their paintings in England four years earlier. The use of English print sources in the first works by Lami and Delaroche with English references (Lami’s lithographic series Les Contretems of 1823–24, which was much indebted to Rowlandson, and Delaroche’s aforementioned Joan of Arc in prison, which owes much to Reynolds and probably Northcote)52 would not have required a visit to England, as English prints were readily available in Paris. But it is reasonable to assume that at the very least the visit of 1822 stimulated their interest in sources of this kind. For Delaroche, too, his exposure
47
M.P. Foissy-Aufrère: exh. cat. La Jeanne d’Arc de Paul Delaroche, Rouen (Musée des Beaux-Arts) 1983; and S. Duffy: Paul Delaroche 1797–1856. Paintings in the Wallace Collection, London 1997, pp.37–42. 48 Whiteley, op. cit. (note 46), ch.3, pp.16–17. 49 Ibid., p.15; and C. Allemand-Cosneau and I. Julia: exh. cat. Paul Delaroche. Un peintre dans l’Histoire, Nantes (Musée des Beaux-Arts) and Montpellier (Musée Fabre) 1999–2000, p.283. 50 Bann, op. cit. (note 39), p.359. 51 P.-A. Lemoisne: L’Oeuvre d’Eugène Lami (1800–1890), Paris 1914, p.ix. 52 Lemoisne, op. cit. (note 36), pp.369–70; and Bann, op. cit. (note 39), pp.356–59. 53 Ibid., pp.365–66. 54 Bann in ibid., pp.343–69, has suggested that Delaroche may have seen Copley’s The defeat of the floating batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (Guildhall Art Gallery, London), and that it influenced his Taking of the Trocadéro (Château de Versailles) of 1827. He also suggested that Delaroche may have met in London the painter James Northcote (1746–1831), who would have provided a theoretical justification for
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8. Studies of armour in the Meyrick collection, by Eugène Delacroix. 1825. Graphite, 19 by 27.8 cm. (Hertford House Historic Collection, Wallace Collection, London).
to English art provided a vital demonstration of how national, and particularly early modern history might be used to inspire major oil paintings which could evoke emotions more intimate than those usually associated with the rhetorical manner of the French academic tradition.53 For both Delaroche and Lami the sights they saw and the contacts they made in London in 1822 may well have also given them a much deeper understanding of the culture from which those prints derived than would have been possible had they stayed in Paris.54 Whereas any sketches that Delaroche, Lami and Bellangé may have made at Meyrick’s armoury are now lost or unidentified, some by Ward are known, while several of those by Delacroix and Bonington have often been exhibited.55 At least twenty drawings by the latter can be identified today, but there were certainly more – Bonington’s first studio sale alone contained nineteen ‘spirited sketches’ drawn from ‘Dr. Meyrick’s Collection’56 – suggesting the thoroughness with which both men approached this opportunity to study such a famous collection. There are drawings by Delacroix dated 8th and 9th July, indicating that he at least went there twice, although in common with Meyrick’s usual practice of a single entry per visitor, he only appears once in the visitors’ book (Fig.8). After his name he wrote his London address, 14 Charles Street, lodgings owned by a picture frame maker,57 but then crossed this out, perhaps at Meyrick’s request, replacing it with his Paris address, 14 rue d’Assas. He had been at Charles Street since his arrival in London in May, although by 1st
August, three weeks after he saw the Meyrick armoury, he had moved to the home of the horse dealer Adam Elmore with whom Gericault had stayed four years earlier.58 As one would expect, Bonington’s entry in the visitors’ book (with his Paris address, 16 rue des Mauvaises Paroles) is close to Delacroix’s, although they are separated by eight names, suggesting that either they chose a busy time to visit or perhaps that Bonington went there first on an earlier day. We know from Delacroix himself that he studied the armour with Bonington,59 but it is from the visitor’s book that we learn that their friend the painter Alexandre Colin (1798–1873) was also there. His name and address (33 rue d’Enfer, Paris) can be found two places after Bonington’s. Colin had been Bonington’s companion when he arrived in London in June, as he had also been during an extended stay in Dunkirk the previous year.60 His presence in the
English historical painting. These are ingenious propositions but, as Bann himself agrees, they cannot be associated specifically with the 1822 visit. 55 For example, L. Johnson: exh. cat. Delacroix, Edinburgh (Royal Scottish Academy) and London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1963–64, pp.46–47, nos.95–96; and Noon, op. cit. (note 35), pp.130–35, nos.37–40. On Ward’s drawings, see O. Beckett, op. cit. (note 41), p.171. 56 Bonington sale, Sotheby and Son, London, 29th and 30th June 1829, lots 15 and 16. Eight sketches of ‘ancient armour’ comprising the previous lot were probably also drawn at Meyrick’s armoury. It may be worth mentioning that Bonington’s A knight and page of c.1826 at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (P. Noon: Richard Parkes Bonington, the complete paintings, New Haven and London 2008, no.401), features the same armour, now at Eastnor Castle, but formerly Meyrick’s, worn by Walter de la Marck in Delacroix’s Murder of the Bishop of Liège (1829; Musée du Louvre, Paris). Johnson, op. cit. (note 11), I, p.132, identifies the armour in Delacroix’s painting. A sheet of studies of this armour by Bonington is in the British Museum, London (inv. no.1857.02.28.160).
57 In 1825, 14 Charles Street was the property of Joseph Green (1801–40), a picture frame maker (London, Westminster Archives, St Marylebone Rate Books, reel 49, 1825, part 2). The lodgings had been found for Delacroix by his English friend Thales Fielding (see Joubin, op. cit. (note 12), I, p.156) who would have known Green through Green’s work for the Society of Painters in Water Colours. On Green, see Jacob Simon’s biographical dictionary of British frame makers (www.npg.org.wk/live/framemakers.asp). Fielding visited Meyrick’s armoury in 1826. 58 Joubin, op. cit. (note 12), I, pp.153 and 167. In his letter to Pierret of 27th June 1825 Delacroix mentions that he had been working at Elmore’s ‘depuis peu de temps’, but the visitors’ book suggests that he was nevertheless still living in Charles Street at this time (ibid., I, p.163). 59 Ibid., IV, p.287. 60 On Colin, see Noon, op. cit. (note 35), esp. pp.263–64; and Noon et al., op. cit. (note 9), esp. pp.137 and 151. In 1861 Delacroix recalled with pleasure the time he spent with Colin in England in 1825; see Joubin, op. cit. (note 12), IV, p.247.
9. Studies of armour in the Meyrick collection, by Alexandre-Marie Colin. 1825. Graphite, 22.4 by 18.6 cm. (Kunsthalle, Bremen).
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10. A view of Westminster from St James’s Park, by Eugène Delacroix. 1825. Watercolour, 14.3 by 23.4 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
book is therefore unsurprising. Much less expected, however, is the signature of another French painter, Gillot Saint-Evre (1791–1858), only four places after Delacroix’s, suggesting that he was also there at the same time. Saint-Evre is now little known, although he was an artist of some consequence in his own time – a former artillery officer who became a history painter specialising in medieval subjects. He had already shown an interest in British literature and history before this visit to London, exhibiting two paintings with scenes from The Tempest at the 1822 Salon, and a Marie Stuart (echappée, la nuit, du château de Lochleven) at the Salon of 1824. He is well represented at Versailles with paintings dating from the 1830s and later, but without more knowledge of his works from the late 1820s one cannot be sure what use he made of his visit to Meyrick’s armoury.61 He does not seem to have been a close friend of Delacroix – he is not mentioned in Delacroix’s journal or his published letters – but that the two men were acquainted, at least in 1826, is proved by Thales Fielding’s requests in letters to Delacroix of that year to remember him to Saint-Evre, Leblond ‘et tous ceux qui fréquentent les soirées’.62 That Colin, like Delacroix and Bonington, made use of his time at the armoury is indicated by a sheet of sketches, annotated ‘C[ollection?]. du docteur Meyric’, showing eleven objects which can almost all be identified with armour now in the Wallace Collection (Fig.9).63 Owned by the Kunsthalle, Bremen, it was exhibited in 1969 under an attribution to Edouard Bertin, but it is clear from comparison with drawings by Colin in the Musée Tavet-Delacour, Pontoise, that it is in fact by Colin.64 The attribution in 1969 to Bertin for a drawing that was clearly not by Delacroix or Bonington seems to have rested only on an assumption that Bertin visited Meyrick’s armoury with Delacroix. This hypothesis, often repeated by Delacroix’s
61
On his Versailles paintings, see C. Constans: Musée national du Château de Versailles. Les Peintures II, Paris 1995, pp.809–11, nos.4567–84. Was perhaps Meyrick’s collection of use to Saint-Evre when painting his Charles IX et Marie Touchet or his Honneurs publics rendus [. . .] aux restes d’Inès de Castro [. . .] en 1350 (both present whereabouts unknown), both exhibited at the 1827 Salon? 62 L. Johnson and M. Hanoosh: Eugène Delacroix. Nouvelles Lettres, Bordeaux 2000, p.97. 63 The armour comprises, from top left to bottom right, greave and sabaton from A26; breastplate and tassets, then backplate of A210; breastplate of A32; (unknown shield); left polder for the field of A43; (unknown helmet); four views of couters from A32; for this armour (and technical terms), see Mann, op. cit. (note 28). 64 Exh. cat.: Von Delacroix bis Maillol, Bremen (Kunsthalle) 1969, p.78, no.126. 65 M. Sérullaz: Musée du Louvre. Inventaire Général. Dessins d’Eugène Delacroix, Paris
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modern biographers, probably derives, not unreasonably, from an annotation on a watercolour view of Westminster Abbey from St James’s Park in one of Delacroix’s English sketchbooks: ‘Vu en allant chez M. Meyrick avec Edouard [Bertin] le vendredi 8 juillet. Fait le lendemain’ (Fig.10).65 However, Bertin’s name does not appear in Meyrick’s visitors’ book. Perhaps he only accompanied Delacroix on his way to Cadogan Place and for some reason did not go inside. He was a landscape rather than a history painter and, unless drawings by him of Meyrick’s armour come to light, there must be some uncertainty whether he ever saw Meyrick’s collection with Delacroix. None of the other names, all English, in the visitors’ book between Bonington’s and Delacroix’s entries seems significant. It is impossible, however, to resist mentioning that J.B.S. Morritt, the owner of the Rokeby Venus (National Gallery, London) is listed immediately after Delacroix. While the name of Morritt’s country seat, Rokeby Hall, Yorkshire, would have been familiar to Delacroix from Walter Scott’s poem Rokeby, published in 1813, it is unlikely that he ever saw Velázquez’s masterpiece which hung there, as, so far as is known, he did not travel to the north of England.66 In the last five years of the armoury’s stay in London, before the move to Herefordshire, there was no decline in the number of visitors, but artists, both British and foreign, were much less prominent among them than they had been earlier. It is difficult to account for this, as there was no reduction in the number of medieval scenes exhibited at the Royal Academy or the Paris Salon. In fact it was precisely at this time that French pictorial representations of Scott’s novels were at their most numerous,67 although perhaps the enthusiasm among younger French painters for the study of British art and culture in situ was already past its peak. Certainly the visitors’ book seems to reflect a waning interest. After Gillot Saint-Evre in 1825 there is only one other French artist listed in it – Delacroix’s friend Louis Auguste Schwiter (1805–89), who visited, probably with the bibliophile Jean-Louis Bourdillon (1772–1856), in about 1829.68 Although Schwiter was not perhaps a very serious artist at this time, he became a portrait painter in the 1830s, exhibiting at the Salon from 1831 to 1859. No doubt his essentially aristocratic temperament attracted him, like so many others, to the romance and ideals associated with Meyrick’s collection, but perhaps it was Bourdillon, the owner of one of the oldest manuscripts of Le Chant de Roland, who had the more informed interest in the armour. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate that Schwiter, who inspired the period’s most remarkable statement of French admiration for British art – his great portrait by Delacroix in the National Gallery – should bring to a close this survey of a handful of the many French visitors who were drawn to England in the years immediately after the Napoleonic wars.
1984, II, pp.344–45, no.1751; and Noon, op. cit. (note 35), pp.136–37, no.41. 66 E. Johnson: Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, New York 1970, I, p.715. It must therefore be a coincidence, although an intriguing one, that Delacroix probably painted Louis d’Orléans showing his mistress (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), which features a female nude rather similar to that of the Rokeby Venus (and shares the theme of the gaze), almost immediately after his return to Paris from London (Johnson, op. cit. (note 11), I, p.98). The other two (English) names between those of Delacroix and Saint-Evre in the visitors’ book do not seem significant in the present context. 67 B. Wright: ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting 1815–1855’, The Art Bulletin 63 (1981), p.269. 68 Their visits are recorded six pages before the end of the book. On Schwiter, see Johnson, op. cit. (note 11), I, pp.54–56; on Bourdillon, see X. Madelin: Histoire de la Bibliothèque: 1792–2000, Châteauroux 2001.
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Friendship in the Romantic studio: Charles-Emile Champmartin’s ‘Portrait of Eugène Delacroix and Alphonse Vée’ by JOHN P. LAMBERTSON
IN HIS REVIEW of the Salon of 1846, Charles Baudelaire singled out Eugène Delacroix as the embodiment of Romanticism.1 In the 1820s and early 1830s, however, critics and the public viewed the painter Charles-Emile Champmartin (1798–1882) as a leader in the Romantic movement alongside his friend Delacroix, both fellow students of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Critics writing about the Salon in 1828 consistently excoriated Delacroix and Champmartin in the same breath, casting them as radical artists or, as Etienne Delécluze explained, ‘the extreme left-wing in painting’.2 In the only sympathetic review of the artists’ major works from that year, the Figaro observed: ‘Champmartin is the scapegoat of the unconverted Romantic school. Delacroix’s Sardanapalus is also set in the pillory’.3 And in 1831, the hostile Journal des artistes claimed that ‘it is a curious thing to see that this time the Romantic coterie (because it still exists) praises Champmartin to the skies’.4 A recently rediscovered oil-sketch by Champmartin, Portrait of Eugène Delacroix and Alphonse Vée (Fig.11), sheds new light on the early days of Romanticism, when Champmartin, Delacroix and Vée (1796–1872) were apprentices in Guérin’s studio. The double-portrait documents the camaraderie of Guérin’s pupils, elucidates their apprenticeship and underscores Champmartin’s significance for the genesis of Romanticism. Champmartin’s portrait remains with Vée’s descendants. According to family tradition it represents a young Delacroix standing slightly behind and to the side of Vée. Delacroix’s early and long friendship with Vée and Champmartin further supports the identification of the second figure in the portrait as Delacroix, who embraces Vée with his right arm while gesturing to the distance with his left. Vée and Delacroix entered Guérin’s studio together in 1815, and they matriculated together at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in March 1816.5 At Guérin’s they met Champmartin, who frequented the atelier by September 1814, and Gericault, who continued to attend Guérin’s sporadically until 1816. Vée studied with Guérin until at least 1818 or 1819, the probable date of the portrait, before renouncing a career as an artist to study pharmacy. About three years after Champmartin
painted his oil-sketch, Delacroix in his Self-portrait as Ravenswood (Fig.12) represented his own features, which resemble those of Champmartin’s image. Although Delacroix obscured his own forehead, Champmartin very loosely rendered his friend’s features, and the artists chose to present different viewpoints of the face, both portraits sharing similar pointed chin, nose and jaw line. After leaving his friends in the studio, Vée opened a pharmacy in 1825, became deputy mayor of Paris’s fifth arrondissement in 1834, mayor of that arrondissement in 1843, and wrote a number of works on social welfare.6 Despite pursuing a different profession, Vée remained lifelong friends with Delacroix and Champmartin, staying in close contact after leaving Guérin’s studio. In 1820 Delacroix wrote to Vée at the pharmacy where he was working about his having contracted a terrible fever while staying with his sister and brother-in-law at the family’s country home in the Forest of Boixe in Charente and apologised for not corresponding sooner and more often.7 Writing in 1855, Delacroix addressed Vée as ‘my dear old friend’, and stated ‘my dear Vée, you are one of the most estimable men whom I have ever met . . .’.8 Champmartin revealed his continuing close friendship with Vée in a letter postmarked 13th November 1841: ‘I am very annoyed that I missed your visit when you called at my house. Please come here next Tuesday evening and have tea with some old friends’ (see Appendix 1 below). Vée also invited Champmartin to his son Léonce’s wedding in 1867.9 Champmartin and Delacroix also enjoyed a long friendship and were especially close during the period of the Bourbon Restoration. In 1818, for instance, they both worked with their friend Gericault: Champmartin as a companion sketching severed heads and body parts and Delacroix as a model for the Raft of the Medusa.10 At this time Champmartin and Delacroix were also working closely on studies of horses – works that attracted Gericault’s attention.11 In 1824, after Gericault’s death, they made a pilgrimage to Léon Cogniet’s studio to contemplate Gericault’s death mask and the Raft of the Medusa; they also met
I wish to thank Bernadette Genès and Shaw Smith for their assistance in the preparation of this article. 1 C. Baudelaire: ‘Salon de 1846’, Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.G. Le Dantec, Paris 1961, pp.878–80. 2 ‘. . . nous trouvons dans les ouvrages de MM. Sigalon, Delacroix et Champmartin l’extrême gauche en peinture’; [E.] D[elécluze].: ‘Beaux-arts. Salon de 1827’, Journal des débats (21st March 1828), p.1. 3 ‘Et voilà, comme quoi M. Champmartin est le bouc émissaire de cette école relapse, romantique. Le Sardanapale de M. Delacroix est aussi au pilori’; ‘Figaro au Salon’, Figaro (7th February 1828), p.1. 4 ‘Néanmoins, c’est une chose curieuse à voir que les efforts de la coterie romantique (car elle existe encore), pour mettre cette fois M. Champmartin sur le pinacle’; Journal des artistes (8th May 1831), p.351.
5 Paris, Archives nationales (cited hereafter as AN), AJ52234, Enregistrement de MM. les élèves, 1807–1847. 6 I am grateful to Françoise Menard from the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de pharmacie, Paris, for providing me with details of Vée’s life and career. 7 L. Johnson: Eugène Delacroix: Further correspondence 1817–1863, Oxford 1991, pp.89–90. 8 ‘Vous êtes, mon cher Vée, un des hommes les plus dignes d’estime que j’aie rencontrés . . .’; ibid., pp.133–34. 9 Letter from Champmartin to Vée, Thursday 28th November 1867; Paris, Fondation Custodia, Callande de Champmartin 1990–A.403. 10 C. Clément: Géricault: Etude biographique et critique, Paris 1879, p.305. 11 Letter from Gericault to Champmartin (n.d.) in Nouvelles archives de l’art français 16 (1900), pp.116–17.
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12. Self-portrait as Ravenswood, by Eugène Delacroix. c.1821. Canvas, 40.9 by 32.3 cm. (Musée Eugène Delacroix, Paris).
11. Portrait of Eugène Delacroix and Alphonse Vée, by Charles-Emile Champmartin. c.1818. Canvas, 44 by 31 cm. (Private collection, Paris).
frequently during preparations for their major submissions to the Salon in 1824, the Massacre of the Innocents and the Massacre at Chios, respectively. In 1826 Champmartin showed Delacroix sketches of his trip to the Holy Land, which began a collaboration between the two artists as Champmartin prepared Massacre of the Janissaries and Delacroix the Death of Sardanapalus for the Salon of 1827. Later, at the Salon of 1840, Champmartin nostalgically evoked his apprenticeship when he exhibited ten portraits in one frame of his friends and fellow students, including one of his venerated friend Delacroix.12 When Delacroix and Vée entered Guérin’s studio, it was sometimes a rowdy place, with Champmartin and Gericault contributing to the mischief. In fact, early biographers reported that
12 On the relationship between Champmartin and Delacroix, see J.P. Lambertson: ‘Delacroix’s “Sardanapalus”, Champmartin’s “Janissaries”, and liberalism in the late Restoration’, Oxford Art Journal 25/2 (2002), pp.65–85. 13 See B. Chenique: ‘Gericault: Une vie’, in M. Régis et al.: exh. cat. Gericault, Paris (Grand Palais) 1991–92, p.266. On Guérin and his students, see also M. Korchane: ‘Guérin et ses éléves: paternité et filiation paradoxales’, in S. Allard ed.: Paris 1820: L’affirmation de la génération romantique, Bern 2005, pp.85–99. 14 Jean Marchand published Delacroix’s novel Les dangers de la cour, Avignon 1960; for a discussion of Delacroix’s fiction, see N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer: Eugène Delacroix: Prints, politics and satire 1814–1822, New Haven and London 1991, p.15; and B. Wright: Painting and history during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the past, Cambridge 1997, pp.128–32.
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Gericault engaged in a water fight and accidentally drenched his master; Delacroix identified the intended recipient of the pail of water as Champmartin.13 In turn, Guérin apparently relished humouring his students in an effort to redirect their energy to work; his lithograph Jack of all trades, master of none (Fig.13) warns students against spreading themselves too thinly. In Guérin’s graphic interpretation of the French proverb, an over ambitious young man attempts to clutch objects symbolising the arts and sciences. Although he manages to grip the geographer’s globe, the geometrician’s protractor and the writer’s manuscript, among other objects, he has lost control of the painter’s palette and brushes, the musician’s harp, the architect’s plan and callipers, and the sculptor’s hammer and chisel, and is about to trip on a vine and drop everything. Perhaps Guérin directed his composition towards an apprentice such as Delacroix who combined studying
15
J.P. Lambertson: ‘The Genesis of French Romanticism: P.-N. Guérin’s studio and the public sphere’, Ph.D diss. (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 1994), pp.27–29. 16 ‘Milles choses à nos bons amis, à Berton s’il a fini son voyage, et mes respects à M. Guérin dont les lettres (de recommendation) me procurent tous les jours les plus grands témoignages de bienveillance. Chacun se souvient de lui avec un plaisir que vous devez concevoir, et son élève en est mieux accueilli partout’; letter from Gericault to Dedreux-Dorcy, 27th November 1816, cited by Clément, op. cit. (note 10), p.88. 17 A. Boime: The Academy and French painting in the nineteenth century, New Haven and London 1971, pp.44–45. 18 ‘. . . je voudrais être a l’atelier, faire des figures, des esquisses, il me semble que je perds mon tems [sic]. je [sic] pense au concours, je pense a ces tableaux qu’il faut que je fasse, je
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as well as the participation of his apprentices in studio exercises. Like his contemporaries, Guérin believed that the sketch embodied the germ of creativity and assigned compositional problems or held sketch competitions in his studio to prepare students for competitions at the Ecole. In fact, with Guérin’s emphatic support, the painted sketch became the preliminary trial for the Prix de Rome in 1817.17 That same year Pierre Berton, another student of Guérin’s, wrote to Cogniet requesting information on the date of the next painted sketch competition at the Ecole, proclaiming: ‘I want to be at the studio to paint figures and sketches. I feel as though I am wasting my time. I think of the competition, I think of those canvases I must paint. I am trying to find the time to go to Guérin’s . . .’.18 Delacroix was a highly motivated participant in Guérin’s innovative curriculum; he wrote to his sister in 1820 that he was going to Guérin’s studio to prepare for the competitions and painted several oil-sketches that may have issued from exercises in the studio.19 Gericault also seems to have taken part in these exercises and left a number of painted sketches from his formative years with Guérin.20 Finally, the dimensions of Champmartin’s oilsketch portrait parallel those of sketches completed during academic training, underscoring the canvas’s relationship to his apprenticeship.21 Guérin took special interest in Champmartin and often sought external support for his pupil. He reported regularly, either in person or by letter, to Champmartin’s mother on her son’s progress.22 After two years of intense guidance, Guérin recommended Champmartin in glowing terms for a stipend from the Ministry of the Royal Household in 1817: 13. Jack of all trades, master of none, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. c.1816. Lithograph. (Bibliothèque nationale, Paris).
M. de Champmartin is worthy of your interest due to the young man’s qualities, by his ability to work in an honourable effort to escape his dire financial situation. I can add that his disposition is remarkable and that he is one of my most talented students. If these various assurances that I give you on his behalf can support your patronage of him, I would be happy to think that another letter from me aided his case (see Appendix 2 below).
art with a passion for writing novels, in 1816 completing Les dangers de la cour in which he exposed the corrupt character of the aristocracy.14 Despite the playful nature of the apprentices in the studio and their extracurricular activities, they responded seriously to Guérin’s academic instruction. Champmartin regularly attended the studio between 1814 and 1821 and Delacroix between 1815 and 1822, mastering drawing and painting, and preparing for competitions at the Ecole.15 When Gericault travelled to Italy in 1816 to complete his artistic education, he instructed a friend to give ‘my respects to M. Guérin whose letters [of recommendation] obtain for me great acts of kindness. Everyone remembers him with a pleasure that you can only imagine, and his student is everywhere received the better for it’.16 Champmartin’s Portrait of Eugène Delacroix and Alphonse Vée reveals the importance of the oil-sketch in Guérin’s curriculum
Guérin’s recommendation prompted Auguste de Forbin, Director of the Louvre, to secure 500 francs for the young man in 1817, noting: ‘Champmartin shows a brilliant aptitude for painting and his development should be encouraged’ (see Appendix 3 below). Based on Guérin’s recommendation and Forbin’s support, Champmartin received two more stipends in 1818, one in 1819, and yet another in 1821, for a grand total of 2,380 francs in four years.23 Forbin also purchased La leçon d’anatomie (lost) for 600 francs after the jury rejected the picture for the Salon of 1819.24 The Director of the Louvre commissioned three additional works from the apprentice: Aristée et Protée (Musée municipale,
cherche le moyen de trouver le tems [sic] d’aller chez M. Guérin et de rester chez moi pour faire des tableaux’; cited in B. Chenique: ‘Le meurtre de père, ou les insensés de l’atelier de Guérin’, in E. Moinet, V. Pomarède and B. Chenique: exh. cat. Le temps des passions: collections romantiques des musées d’Orléans, Orléans (Musée des BeauxArts) 1997–98, p.63. 19 A. Joubin, ed.: Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix, Paris 1935, I, p.106. Lee Johnson discussed a number of these sketches in his The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue 1816–1831, Oxford 1981, I, pp.71–72, 161 and 202–03. 20 G. Bazin: Théodore Géricault: Etude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, Paris 1987, II, pp.315–22 and 506–19. 21 For the sketch competitions at the Ecole, see P. Grunchec: Les concours d’esquisses
peintes, 1816–1863, Paris 1986. 22 The Fondation Custodia in Paris conserves four letters from Guérin to Champmartin’s mother; Bruno Chenique published two in idem, op. cit. (note 18), pp.61–62. 23 See AN, O31439, reports dated 13th September 1817; 6th July 1818; 29th December 1818; and 23rd June 1821; and AN, O31277, report dated 4th May 1819. 24 Forbin purchased the canvas in February 1820; Paris, Archives des Musées Nationaux (cited hereafter as AMN), 2DD1, Musées royaux. Peinture. Commandes et acquisitions 1814–1824, no.3790. An ‘x’ on the ledger of entries for the Salon of 1819 indicates the painting was rejected; AMN, xSalon 1819, Musée royal. Registre d’inscription des productions des artistes vivans présentées à l’exposition, Salon de 1819, no.145.
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about his artistic future and the status of landscape, Vée consulted his maternal uncle who counselled him in a letter: Perhaps the new genre [landscape] will help you understand your abilities and to use them with more confidence. I understand its inferiority to history painting, but think that prominence increases only in relation to difficulty. Who can say that you would have mastered history painting well enough to surpass the success that you will attain with landscape? (see Appendix 4 below).
Louviers), in 1819 for 1,500 francs, the Descent from the cross (Eglise de Romenay) in 1820 for 2,000 francs, and St Sebastian (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes), in 1821 for 1,500 francs.25 Forbin actually called on Guérin to supervise the entire creation of a Descent from the cross from the initial sketch to the completed picture and paid Champmartin in three instalments as the student completed the apprenticeship commission to his master’s satisfaction. The support of Guérin and Forbin also secured the purchase of two paintings by the Prefect of Paris, The communion of the Magdalen (lost) in about 1821 for 2,400 francs and St John the Evangelist (lost) in 1823 for 2,400 francs, and two paintings by the Ministry of the Interior, the Entombment (lost) in 1820 for 2,000 francs and Portrait of Louis XVIII (Musée de Berry, Bourges) in 1820 for an unrecorded sum.26 About the time Champmartin received his first stipends and commissions, Vée re-evaluated his career as a history painter. In the portrait, Vée clutches his sketchbook in the countryside rather than in the studio or city street, as Delacroix points forward, perhaps suggesting Vée’s future greatness resided in landscape painting rather than history painting. Apparently worried
Guérin probably encouraged Vée’s interest in landscape, since the master supported landscape painting as an alternative career to history painting and led efforts to establish the Prix de Rome for historical landscape at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1817.27 In 1821 Guérin also successfully proposed a biannual sketch competition for landscape painters at the Ecole.28 The apprentices supplemented their education in Guérin’s studio with contemporaneous study at the Ecole, taking part in academic exercises and competitions at all levels (Fig.14). They competed for seats in the life-drawing class, where each term daily drawing exercises were the foundation of academic training. For instance, between 1815 and 1822 Delacroix and Champmartin won places four times and Vée once. They also took part in special courses on anatomy and perspective. Although records of attendance in special courses do not exist, Champmartin’s and Delacroix’s work suggests considerable interest in the anatomy class taught by Jean-Joseph Sue, a wellrespected surgeon, who lectured from prints, ancient sculpture, anatomical preparations and actual corpses.29 In addition, Vée participated in the perspective class in 1816, documented by his entry card that remains with his descendants. Of the three friends, only Champmartin won a minor competition; he received a first-class medal and 300 francs in 1820 for his painted half-figure (Fig.15). As for the Prix de Rome, the major competition at the Ecole that supported five years of study in Italy, Vée and Delacroix never passed the first trial – a painted sketch. Champmartin, on the other hand, passed the test annually from 1817 to 1823 and the second trial, a painted academic figure, from 1818 to 1821. He, however, never won the prize.30 Shortly thereafter, as Romanticism emerged at the Salon of 1824, the art critic Auguste Jal compared the painting of Champmartin to the work of the recently deceased Gericault, evoking the years of apprenticeship with Guérin as well as student camaraderie. The critic highlighted the inventive qualities of the sketch, central to Guérin’s curriculum, evident in Champmartin’s painting: ‘There is resourcefulness in his inspired structures; M. Champmartin is full of hope; come 1826, and you will see’.31 In fact, Delacroix’s gesture in Champmartin’s oil-sketch portrait personifies Guérin’s precept that the path to artistic success travels through the sketch, and the painting itself may have been the product of a studio exercise or inspired by Guérin’s teaching. Although Gericault was dead and Vée had renounced painting for pharmacy by 1824, Champmartin’s artistic career
25
29
14. Vée’s admission letter to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 1816–17. (Private collection, Paris).
Documents on the commissions may be found in, respectively, AN, O31402; O31404; and O31406; see also AMN, 2DD1, Musées royaux. Peinture. Commandes et acquisitions 1814–1824, nos.3690, 3978 and 3979. 26 For documents relating to the Prefect’s commissions, see Archives de Paris, 10624/72/1, Liasse 41. On the Minister of the Interior’s acquisitions, see AN, F211, dossiers 13 and 14. 27 Boime, op. cit. (note 17), p.142. 28 Ibid., p.144.
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Lambertson, op. cit. (note 15), pp.49–52. For a published lists of competitors, see P. Grunchec: Le grand prix de peinture: Les concours des Prix de Rome de 1791 à 1863, Paris 1983, pp.163–78. On the apprentices’ activities at the Ecole, see Lamberston, op. cit. (note 15), pp.43–59. 31 A. Jal: Salon de 1824: l’Artiste et le philosophe, Paris 1824, pp.90–92. 32 Tableaux dont on pourrait proposer l’acquisition; AMN, xSalon 1824, Salon de 1824. 1824. 33 Letter from Alphonse de Gisors to Auguste de Forbin, 21st April 1825; AMN, P30, Champmartin. 30
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15. Painted half-figure, by Charles-Emile Champmartin. 1820. Canvas, 85 by 100 cm. (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris).
seemed full of possibility. At the end of the Salon, Forbin contemplated purchasing his Massacre of the Innocents, but the Ministry of the Interior acquired it for a provincial church.32 In an unprecedented gesture, Forbin ordered that Champmartin’s painting be hung temporarily in the Luxembourg Museum, Paris, dedicated to outstanding works by living French artists,
where the picture remained with Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios for one month before being sent to the provinces.33 Despite Champmartin’s auspicious beginnings and importance for the development of French Romantic painting, he slowly became marginalised during the July Monarchy and barely rates mention today in biographies of his famous friend Delacroix.
Appendix
. Report from Auguste de Forbin, Director of the Louvre to comte de Pradel, Director General of the Royal Household, dated th September [] (Archives nationales, Paris, O31281).
. Excerpt from a letter from Charles-Emile Champmartin to Alphonse Vée, postmarked th November , addressed to Monsieur Vée pharmacien, rue du fg St Denis, Paris (Fondation Custodia, Paris, Callande de Champmartin 1990–A.401). Mon cher Vée, vous êtes venu chez moi et je suis bien fâché d’avoir manqué votre visite. Soyez assez bon pour venir chez moi mardi prochain le soir nous prendrons une tasse de thé avec de vieux camarades. Mille amitiés, E. Champmartin
. Letter from Pierre-Narcisse Guérin to M. de la Boulaye, dated th September (Archives nationales, Paris, O31439).
Paris le 5 7bre 1817 Monsieur, L’intérêt que vous êtes disposé à prendre à Mr. de Champmartin est justifié par les qualités de ce jeune homme, par sa situation fâcheuse et par son aptitude au travail, moyen honorable qu’il emploie pour s’y soustraire. Je puis ajouter que ses dispositions sont très remarquables et que c’est un de mes élèves sur le talent duquel je comte le plus. Si ces différentes assurances que [je] vous donne à son égard, Monsieur, peuvent rendre fructueux votre intérêt pour lui je serai heureux de penser ce que j’ai contribué sous un rapport de plus à lui être utile. Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, l’hommage de la considération distinguée avec laquelle j’ai l’honneur d’être Monsieur votre très humble et très obéissant serviteur Guérin Mbr. de L’Institut
Du 13 Septembre [1817] Rapport à M. le Cte. Mr. Guérin recommande à la bienveillance de Mr. le Cte. le sieur Champmartin, son élève, qui annonce ses dispositions très brillantes pour la peinture, dont on ne saurait trop exciter l’émulation. On propose en conséquence à Mr le Cte de vouloir bien accorder à ce jeune artiste une gratification de 500f qui lui serait payée sur le fonds de 8000 porté dans le budget de 1817 pour les encouragemens à donner aux artistes. Approuvé.
. Letter from M. Liger to Alphonse Vée, dated August (private collection, Paris). Peut-être même ce nouveau genre (le paysage) contribuera-t-il à te faire connaître tes forces et te mettra-t-il à même de prendre un parti avec plus d’assurance? Je sens toute son infériorité sur celui d’histoire (la peinture historique) mais je crois penser avec raison en supposant que la célébrité n’est grande qu’en raison des difficultés, qui peut répondre que tu les aurais vaincues avec assez d’avantage pour outrepasser le degré de mérite auquel tu atteindras dans le paysage. Au surplus, il faut te résigner avec courage et ne pas abandonner l’espoir que, sous peu, tu pourras suivre ton goût. Je partage ton avis sur la miniature mais je ne puis m’empêcher de me plaindre de l’opinion où tu es que notre jugement sur les peintres n’est fondé que sur ce que nous voyons dans les talents des peintres de province qui se livrent à ce genre. Car, avec plus de justice, tu aurais dû penser que lorsque nous doutions des moyens de fortune que pouvait présenter l’art de la peinture, nous calculions moins les succès des artistes de province que ceux des parisiens parmi lesquels nous remarquons beaucoup d’appelés et peu d’élus [emphasis in original]. Mais en tout état de choses je me suis plu à reconnaître tes grandes dispositions et je partage bien sincèrement les espérances qu’elles doivent faire naître. the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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Jean-François Millet’s ‘Waiting’: a ‘realist’ religious painting by SIM ON KELLY
16. Waiting, by Jean-François Millet. c.1853–61. Canvas, 83.8 by 121.6 cm. (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City).
AT THE PRESTIGIOUS New York sale in 1891 of works owned by the American collector George Seney, Jean-François Millet’s Waiting (Fig.16) sold for the substantial sum of $40,500, the highest price of this sale and nearly seventy times its original price.1 A rare example of an explicitly religious subject in Millet’s œuvre, the picture was described in the sale catalogue as ‘in the loftiest vein of feeling which the artist expressed in his works’ and viewed as a pendant to the artist’s scene of praying peasants, the
Angelus (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), the most famous and expensive modern painting of its day.2 Waiting retained its fame into the early twentieth century when it was praised by Walter Sickert in 1923 as ‘a great classic of universal and eternal interest’.3 The painting’s commercial and critical success indeed symbolised the enormous posthumous appeal of Millet’s work, particularly for wealthy American collectors. Yet, this later appeal has meant that the original radicalism of many of Millet’s pictures, including
My thanks to Robert L. Herbert for his encouraging comments on a draft of this article. All translations are the author’s, unless otherwise noted. 1 The catalogue of this sale in the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, is annotated by the dealer Roland Knoedler, who noted that this amount corresponded to 202,000 francs; Millet had sold the work for 3,000 francs; see sale, New York, American Art Association, The Catalogue of Mr. George I. Seney’s Important Collection of Modern Paintings, 11th–13th February 1891, p.286, lot 296. 2 Ibid. 3 See W. Sickert: ‘French Pictures at Knoedler’s Gallery’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 42 (1923), p.40, repr. opp. p.45. 4 137 commentaries in total appeared on the Salon of 1861, but many were brief, with no reference to Millet’s works. I have consulted forty of the longer reviews and
a majority discuss Millet’s paintings in some detail. For criticism at the 1861 Salon, see C. Parsons and M. Ward, eds.: A Bibliography of Salon Criticism in Second Empire Paris, Cambridge 1986, pp.72–93. 5 See R.L. Herbert: exh. cat. Jean-François Millet, Paris (Grand Palais) 1975. Herbert has pointed out to me that he did request this picture from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, for that exhibition but the loan was refused. Herbert has recently noted: ‘I can still envision, with painful regret, Waiting’s hole on the wall in that otherwise grand phalanx of Millet’s major works in Paris 33 years ago’ (personal communication, 2nd May 2008). Nor did the work appear in the most recent major Millet exhibition, see A. Murphy et al., eds.: exh. cat. Jean-François Millet. Drawn into the Light, Williamstown (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute), Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum) and Pittsburgh (Frick Art Museum) 2002.
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17. Woman feeding her child, by Jean-François Millet. 1861. Canvas, 114 by 99 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille).
Waiting, has often been overlooked. Exhibited at the 1861 Paris Salon, Waiting helped to establish Millet’s reputation as one of the most controversial painters of his age. This article aims to rediscover the picture’s original avant-garde and ‘realist’ qualities by examining both its genesis and the largely unknown critical discourse around it.4 For all its early renown, Waiting has been neglected in recent Millet studies. In part this can be ascribed to the fact that the picture did not appear in Robert Herbert’s fundamental monographic Millet exhibition in 1975, which has in many ways established the subsequent canon of the artist’s work.5 Recent years have seen a renewed interest in Millet and in the artists of the Barbizon School in general, particularly in regard to the often controversial radical nature of their works. This is perhaps especially true of Millet. Herbert has highlighted the importance of Millet’s Salon exhibits between 1857 and 1863 and examined the way in which, within the critical discourse at that time, Millet was seen as supplanting Courbet as the most radical figure within the ‘realist’ movement.6 These years indeed saw the exhibition of incendiary images at the Salon such as The gleaners (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), shown in 1857, and the powerful Man with the hoe (J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, Los Angeles), shown at the 1863 Salon and famously compared by the critic Paul de Saint-Victor to a ‘cretin’ escaped from a mental asylum.7 Millet began Waiting in 1853 but put it to one side the following year.8 He returned to it in 1860, largely as a result of the encouragement of the dealer Arthur Stevens who agreed to pay the large sum of 3,000 francs for the completed painting. On 6 See R.L. Herbert: ‘Millet, Courbet et Thoré-Bürger’, in L. Lepoittevin, ed.: Jean-François Millet. Au-delà de l’Angelus, Paris 2002, pp.290–301. 7 See P. de Saint-Victor: ‘Salon de 1863’, in E. Moreau-Nélaton: Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris 1921, II, pp.134–35. 8 See Louis Campredon to Millet, 3rd February 1854; Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Aut.2416. Campredon here mentions that the Alsatian collector Frédéric Hartmann was interested in buying La mère de Tobie. 9 See Millet to Théodore Rousseau, 2nd May 1860; Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Aut.1897. Soon after it formed part of the body of twenty-five works sold to the dealer Arthur Stevens and his banker Ennemond Blanc. This consignment included several important works, but it is of interest that Millet gave the highest price to Waiting, assigning it a value of 3,000 francs.
18. The mother of Tobias, by Charles Gleyre. 1860. Pencil and crayon on ochre paper, 36.7 by 62.7 cm. (Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne).
2nd May 1860 Millet noted that he was ‘working like mad’ on the picture.9 At the Salon of the following year it formed the centrepiece of Millet’s display of three works, the other two being A sheepshearer (private collection, Japan), and Woman feeding her child (Fig.17).10 At this Salon, Gustave Courbet chose to move away from his figurative imagery towards less politically controversial subjects such as landscapes and hunting scenes and it was Millet’s paintings that attracted debate. As Olivier Merson wrote, while Courbet ‘reforms and improves’, Millet was becoming ‘darker and more sombre’.11 The conservative critic comtesse de Rethel even noted that Millet had now gone ‘miles beyond’ Courbet in terms of the ‘ugliness’ of his work.12 While A sheepshearer – a large-scale variant of a subject that Millet had first treated in the early 1850s – was the most favourably received of Millet’s exhibits, Woman feeding her child was strongly criticised for its ugliness and lack of naturalism.13 It was, however, the religious subject of Waiting that attracted the greatest controversy. Waiting was inspired by an episode from the Book of Tobit, the third book of the Apocrypha, which recounts the travels of Tobias with the archangel Raphael and his eventual discovery of a cure for his father’s blindness by cutting out the gall bladder of a fish. Millet chose a rarely depicted scene as Tobias’s mother, Anna, anxiously looks into the distance in the hope of her son’s return, shading her eyes against the setting sun. Anna’s blind, frail husband, Tobit, stumbles out from the doorway of their house; his mouth is slightly open, his right foot extended hesitantly and his left hand fumbles on the door jamb. Millet here sought to transpose biblical themes into a naturalistic vein of contemporary peasant costume and a familiar village setting. There were, of course, precedents for such a strategy – most notably in the work of Rembrandt and Pieter Bruegel the Elder – but, by the mid-nineteenth century, such modes of representation were largely neglected at 10
These are Millet’s original titles listed in the 1861 Salon livret as Une tondeuse de moutons; Femme faisant manger son enfant; and L’Attente. 11 ‘. . . de jour en jour plus sauvage et plus sombre [. . .] s’amende et s’améliore . . .’; see O. Merson: Exposition de 1861. La peinture en France, Paris 1861, p.114. 12 ‘Que dites-vous de ces affreux tableaux de M. Millet? [. . .] L’artiste a gagé sans doute qu’il ferait plus laid que M. Courbet, et il l’a dépassé de cent piques’; see comtesse de Rethel: ‘Exposition de peinture de 1861’, Journal des Dames (September 1861), p.191. 13 For Millet’s subsequent efforts to promote this painting by producing a reproductive print, see S. Kelly: ‘Strategies of Repetition: Millet/Corot’, in E. Kahng, ed.: exh. cat. The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse, Baltimore (Walters Art Museum) and Phoenix (Art Museum) 2007–08, pp.70–71. the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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19. Anonymous photograph of a view of Millet’s home in Gruchy. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
the Salon in favour of a more idealised religious painting. Adolphe-William Bouguereau, for example, enjoyed success with his biblical scenes set in ahistorical locations, his figures in flowing eastern robes. Another more historicist trend sought to represent the Bible in the authentic setting and costume of the ancient world. Indeed, Charles Gleyre treated the same moment as Millet in the barren desert of eighth-century BC Nineveh (Fig.18).14 In Waiting, however, both parents wear the thick woollen clothing of the French peasantry, Tobit’s black felt hat, grey gaiters and red waistcoat with holes in it, emphasising his poverty. A ginger cat arches its back and through the fence of a sheepfold newly shorn sheep poke their heads. In the distance crows come to roost as the setting sun illuminates the clouds in tints of pink. Other details such as the iron ring by the door and the ties on the fence further highlight the rusticity of the scene, its self-contained nature exemplified in the way Anna turns away from the spectator.15 Waiting can be seen as part of Millet’s broader artistic strategy to reconfigure the genre of contemporary religious painting. Already in 1853 he had exhibited his naturalistic peasant scene Harvesters resting (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) inspired by the Old Testament narrative of Ruth and Boaz. Now, in 1861, he exhibited Waiting accompanied by a verse from the Book of Tobit (10:7): ‘The mother of Tobias “daily running out looked round about, and went into all the ways by which there seemed any hope he might return, that she might if possible see him coming afar off”’.16 Although he was probably agnostic, Millet was deeply familiar with the Bible and drawn to its poetry. Early readings of Waiting by Millet’s first biographers – including Alfred Sensier and Etienne Moreau-Nélaton – focused on the
14 For a useful discussion of Millet’s religious subjects, see B. Foucart: Le renouveau de la peinture religieuse en France (1800–1860), Paris 1987, pp.278–98. 15 See M. Fried: Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, Chicago 1996, pp.188–91. 16 ‘La mère de Tobie “sortait avec empressement tous les jours de sa maison, regardant de tous côtés et allant dans tous les chemins par lesquels elle espérait qu’il pourrait revenir, pour tâcher de le découvrir de loin à son retour”’; see Salon de 1861. Explication des Ouvrages de Peinture, Sculpture des Artistes Vivants exposés au Palais des Champs-Elysées, no.2254. This English translation is from the Douai Bible, Philadelphia 1914, p.521. 17 See A. Sensier: La Vie et l’Oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, Paris 1881, pp.136–37. 18 As Alexandra Murphy has noted, the work may also have had a wider social resonance in alluding to the contemporary migration of rural youth to the cities; see A. Murphy: Jean-François Millet, Tokyo 1991, p.32.
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autobiographical resonance of the picture, seeing it as inspired by the death of his mother in 1853 and his own remorse that he had not returned to see her in Normandy before she died. In this reading, the figure of Anna symbolised Millet’s own mother, anxiously awaiting the return of her errant son.17 The autobiographical associations of this work are, indeed, further reinforced by the similarity of the simple stone house to that of Millet’s childhood home in the village of Gruchy (Fig.19).18 Such a focus, however, although made with some justification, deflected attention from the work’s originality of conception. The importance that Millet ascribed to the composition of Waiting is reflected in the more than twenty preparatory studies which he produced.19 Rarely did he make more preparatory drawings for a painting.20 As Susan Waller has recently noted, Millet used peasant models rather than professional Parisian models, thus heightening the ‘authenticity’ of his conception.21 The young Barbizon peasant girl Adèle Marier (née Moschner; 1841–95), in particular, served as a model for the figure of Anna while her grandfather may have been the model for Tobit.22 Adèle later noted that Waiting was the first painting for which she posed for Millet at the age of eighteen. She remembered that the artist brought her into his studio and made her pose wearing a white cowl with a black band, such as ‘we wore in times past for going to evening gatherings’.23 Although a young girl, she was nonetheless able to serve as a model for the aged Anna, particularly as Millet chose not to show the woman’s face. For the composition, Millet followed traditional practice, producing drawings augmented by studies of individual figures and details. Among the former is a spontaneous sketch, seemingly produced on a scrap of paper, in which Millet meditates the early stages of his image (Fig.20). Two wheel-like shapes at lower right suggest some kind of cart, while the sunset is much more prominent than in the final painting, appearing as a large demi-orb.24 Millet, however, ultimately abandoned this motif, preferring to create an atmosphere of hushed anticipation rather than exaggerated drama. Two more developed compositional drawings are on either side of a sheet now in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.25 In the recto drawing (Fig.22), the figure of Anna is close to the finished painting, as is the configuration of the house and stone bench, but Tobit is bearded and wears a short pleated tunic which suggests antique dress and a historical treatment of the narrative. In the more densely worked verso drawing (Fig.21), Millet has struggled with the position of Tobit, now dressed in more contemporary garb, who is represented in ghost-like form in the centre of the composition, and again more firmly to the right. In addition Millet includes what appears to be a resting cat at lower left, prefiguring this same motif in the final painting. He has also added lines of yellow pastel in the sky to suggest the light of a dying sunset.
19
Millet’s composition may also have been informed by his idea for a painting on the theme of The prodigal son, for which he produced a large drawing (Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris). 20 Exceptions are the approximately fifty preparatory drawings for his Harvesters resting (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and the approximately thirty drawings for The gleaners (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). 21 See S. Waller: ‘Rustic poseurs: peasant models in the practice of Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton’, Art History 31/2 (2008), pp.195–200. 22 ‘Mère Adèle told me that she considered “L’Attente” (for which she posed) the best of her master’s paintings. She always spoke of it under its original title, “La Mère de Tobie” . . .’; see N. Peacock: ‘Millet’s Model’, The Artist (July 1899), pp.129–34. 23 Adèle’s memories were later recounted in an article in Le Figaro: ‘M. Millet m’avait connue toute petite. J’avais dix-huit ans quand il me prit à son service: “Adèle, me dit-il un
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20. Study for ‘Waiting’, by Jean-François Millet. c.1853–54. Pencil on paper, 8.6 by 10.8 cm. (Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris).
21. Study for ‘Waiting’, by Jean-François Millet. c.1853–54. Charcoal and pastel, verso of Fig.22.
22. Study for ‘Waiting’, by Jean-François Millet. c.1853–54. Charcoal on blue-grey paper, 27 by 30.48 cm. (Santa Barbara Museum of Art).
23. Standing woman seen from behind, by Jean-François Millet. c.1860. Black conté crayon on paper, 31.9 by 25.8 cm. (Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris).
Millet also produced a number of single-figure studies for Anna, based on Adèle Marier.26 In perhaps the most significant of Millet’s experiments with Anna’s gesture (Fig.23), he shows her left arm in two different positions – shading her eyes against the sunlight and resting on her knee for support – eventually deciding on the latter pose which emphasises her infirmity, thus heightening the poignancy of her wait for her son. Millet also produced several studies of Tobit, in some of which the old man is represented with arms outstretched (Fig.24).27 As Millet evolved his composition, he gave his figure a more restrained pose, shifting Tobit’s stick to his right hand and placing his left hand as a steadying support on the door jamb. Millet, indeed, devoted particular attention to Tobit’s hands. A sheet of studies shows three sketches of his right hand framed by two of his left resting on the door jamb (Fig.25). All these preparatory drawings highlight Millet’s anti-academic drawing technique, particularly evident in his penchant for broken line. In the final
painting he added the ginger cat: is it hissing or perhaps yawning, having been awakened after a late afternoon snooze on a warm stone bench? Cats were a favourite motif for Millet and the straightened tail and hostile expression suggest it is hissing, reacting to something outside the picture frame. Perhaps it has a ‘sixth sense’ regarding the imminent arrival of Tobias and the angel. Its arched back arguably inspired the pose of the black cat in the Olympia (1863) by Manet, an artist who exhibited alongside Millet in 1861 (the exhibition was arranged alphabetically) and who attracted praise from a similar range of critics as the Barbizon artist.28 Although grounded in the study of peasant models, Waiting also suggests the influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Millet’s interest in Bruegel is well known and his attraction to such a
jour, veux-tu poser comme ton père?” J’acceptai tout de suite. Que n’aurai-je fait pour un si bon maître? Alors, il m’emmena dans son atelier et me mit sur la tête un capuchin blanc orné d’une bande noire, comme on en portait jadis pour aller aux veillées [. . .] Cette fois-là, je posai pour la femme de Tobie. Le tableau s’appelait “l’Attente” . . .’; see H. Petitjean: ‘Le Modèle de Millet’, Le Figaro (27th September 1898). 24 See the five other small compositional drawings in the Musée du Louvre; RF 5719r, 11254, 5717, 23593 and 23595. 25 Both sides appear to have been displayed in the past (the recto has faded to grey but is blue-grey outside the matted area). The drawing is on a thick hand-made paper flecked with tiny wood chips that gives a rugged surface. My thanks to Nancy Rogers, conservator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, for this information. 26 Further studies of Anna are in the Musée du Louvre; RF 5716r, 5881 and 5722r.
The latter largely established the final position of the figure. A sheet sold at Christie’s, London, 9th April 1976, lot 166, has drawings of Anna in several different poses on both recto and verso. There is also a tiny study in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. 27 There are at least five drawings in which he sought to work out the pose of Tobit; see Musée du Louvre, RF 5718v, 5721r, 5720r and 11263v. The latter shows the essential final configuration of Millet’s figure (although Millet slightly elongates Tobit’s legs; see also a study (26 by 22.5 cm.) in a private collection, New Haven. 28 See, most notably, Alfred Sensier who, as T.J. Clark has noted, produced (under his pseudonym of Jean Ravenel) the most insightful review of Olympia at the 1865 Salon; see T.J. Clark: The Painting of Modern Life, New York 1984, pp.139–41. Sensier was of course Millet’s great friend, supporter and biographer. the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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24. Half-length study of Tobit, by Jean-François Millet. c.1853–54. Pencil on paper, 8.6 by 10.8 cm. (Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris).
25. Study of hands, by Jean-François Millet. c.1860. Black conté crayon on paper, 31.9 by 25.8 cm. (Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris).
figure outside the canons of conventional academic art further reinforced the radical charge of his work. Bruegel’s paintings, although known in mid-nineteenth-century France, constituted an outsider tradition in comparison to the Raphaelesque mode of religious painting legitimised by academic theory.29 As Robert Herbert first noted, the figure of Tobit in Waiting resembles the protagonists of Bruegel’s The blind leading the blind (Fig.26).30 Tobit is especially close to the third figure from the left in Bruegel’s picture, sharing the upturned face and slightly open mouth. Although Millet never saw this painting in person (it was then, as now, in the Capodimonte in Naples), he may have known it through reproduction or even through a copy after the painting that passed through the Parisian art market.31 Millet’s picture can be usefully compared with a version by AdolpheWilliam Bouguereau, who repeatedly treated the Tobit narrative but in a very different classicising, Raphaelesque fashion, as in his Departure of Tobias (Fig.27). Bouguereau here represents his protagonists in loose, flowing robes unspecific to a particular historical epoch. A comparison between the two artists’ treatments of the face of the elderly Tobit is especially revealing. Bouguereau portrays him with upturned eyes and idealised expression in his characteristic polished facture. Millet, in contrast, represents his old man with a contorted and tortured expression, with mouth
half-open, while allowing his red-brown imprimatura layer to show through clearly. Millet’s three works caused controversy among the Salon jury in 1861 and two of the three were initially refused. Millet had to contend with the opposition of the comte de Nieuwerkerke, the powerful Directeur des Beaux-Arts and president of the Salon jury, who dismissed his works, largely on formal grounds, for their ‘lack of drawing’ and ‘cottony colour’.32 However, all three works were finally accepted. Even then, Nieuwerkerke somewhat maliciously agitated for the ‘skying’ of Waiting in the ‘Himalayas’.33 In his turn Millet lobbied for the display of his picture on the ‘rail’ at eye level and in good light.34 We cannot be sure if he was successful but the amount of Salon criticism suggests that Waiting was, in fact, favourably hung. Indeed, Millet enjoyed the strong support of another important government administrator Philippe de Chennevières who was sympathetic to his work, in part, at least, because they shared common roots in Normandy. According to Sensier, Chennevières found Waiting ‘excellent’, admiring the figures in particular, and even suggesting that Millet make a woodcut after it since he considered that the style of the work harked back to the ‘robust old masters’.35 From the start of the Salon, Millet’s pictures polarised opinion, attracting both fervent opposition and fervent support. The critic
29 See R.L. Herbert: ‘Naïve Impressions from Nature: Millet’s Readings, from Montaigne to Charlotte Brontë’, Art Bulletin 89 (2007), pp.549–50. 30 See idem: ‘City vs. Country: the Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin’, in Art Forum 8/6 (1970), pp.44–55; repr. in idem: From Millet to Léger. Essays in Social Art History, New Haven and London 2002. 31 It is notable that he requested photographs of works from Italian collections from a friend who visited Italy in the mid-1860s. Six copies after that work by Pieter Brueghel the Younger are listed in K. Ertz: Pieter Brueghel Der Jüngere (1564–1637/38), Die Gemälde mit kritischen Oeuvrekatalog, Lingen 2000. 32 ‘Vos trois tableaux sont reçus. Deux ont été seulement acceptés à la revision. Vous en avez un à hauteur d’appui; les deux autres dans le firmament. Je vais me remuer pour tâcher de faire revenir l’administration sur son arrêt. Mais le plus terrible argument est que votre peinture ne plait pas à M. de Nieukerke; manque de dessin, couleur cotonneuse et toutes les bourdes académiques que vous devez vous figurer venant du grand directeur’; see Sensier to Millet, 15th April 1861; Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Aut.2563. 33 ‘Celui qui me parait le plus à craindre est le Comte de Nieukerke, qui répète qu’il n’aime
pas votre peinture (comme si vous fesiez de l’art pour les Rufians) et qui pousse son mauvais vouloir jusqu’à decider que vos deux figures seront exposées dans les hauteurs de l’Himalaya. Comme ce gentilhomme est, au total, chargé de l’avenir des artistes, vous voyez qu’il faut se defend contre les atteintes de cet idiot’; see Sensier to Millet, 21st April 1861; Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Aut.2564. 34 ‘Si seulement M. de Chennevières peut me faire placer le Tobie à hauteur d’appui et dans un lieu ayant quelque lumière, ce sera déjà très beau. Enfin, et si ce n’est pas pour vous d’un trop grand ennui, faites ce que vous pourrez pour que Tobie soit à hauteur d’appui’; see Millet to Sensier, 23rd April 1861; Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Aut.1930. 35 ‘Chennevières, lui, aime ce que vous faites; et puis, vous êtes Normand, ce qui est une grande qualité pour lui. Il trouve votre Tobie excellent; c’est son mot, et vous devriez, m’a-t-il dit, en faire une gravure sur bois; car le style de l’oeuvre rentre tout à fait dans les sujets des vieux maîtres robustes. Vos figures l’étonnent beaucoup et il n’a pu m’en dire plus long’; see letter cited at note 33 above. Millet does not seem to have pursued Chennevières’s suggestion. 36 See J. Rousseau: ‘Discutés’, Le Figaro (6th June 1861), pp.5–6.
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26. The blind leading the blind, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 1568. Tempera on canvas, 86 by 156 cm. (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples).
Jean Rousseau saw Millet’s works as those which aroused most debate at the exhibition,36 and they attracted praise from a group of radical left-wing critics who recognised Millet’s empathy for an increasingly marginalised and neglected peasant class. Louis Leroy even coined the term ‘milletistes’ to describe the artist’s passionate supporters. For these critics, Millet’s sympathetic and ennobling treatment of his peasants stood in stark contrast to the sense of urban decadence which they perceived in Second Empire Paris. The young critic Théodore Pelloquet focused on the unpretentious poignancy of Waiting and remarked on ‘a melancholic and tender sentiment that one cannot forget’, noting that the picture was characterised by ‘this epic intimacy of which one finds examples only in the greatest geniuses’.37 The liberal critic and radical politician Anatole de La Forge described Millet as ‘in the first rank of contemporary painters’ and contrasted the ‘honest’ morality of his work and ‘its true appreciation of life in the fields’ with the ‘affectations of a degenerate art’ which was for him exemplified by the work of the society portraitist François-Xavier Winterhalter, court painter to Napoleon III.38 Perhaps surprisingly, he also contrasted the ‘courageous misery’ of Millet’s peasant Tobit with a lazy urban manufacturing class.39 Millet’s picture was also praised by the left-wing radical Théophile Thoré, who defined Millet’s work by its ‘moral’ quality, noting that the artist celebrates ‘in his austere images custom, work, resignation, pain, virtue’, again seeing these qualities as a counterpoint to the decadence of Paris.40 In addition to seeing Millet’s exhibits as a social critique, these writers also praised the formal innovation of Waiting, with Pelloquet praising Millet’s compositional ‘daring’ in deciding not to show the face of Anna,
and Thoré remarking on the artist’s accomplished draughtsmanship, particularly in the form of the aged woman.41 Most critics, however, were hostile. The controversy around Millet’s three paintings centred on their perceived ‘ugliness’, shocking the public by their lack of polish and refinement. Albert de la Fizelière summed up the opposition to Millet: ‘This painting arouses recriminations and leads to criticism. M. Millet is blamed for choosing vulgar and ugly types’.42 Conservative critics railed against the ‘caricatural gaucherie’ of Millet’s figures,43 as they did too at his other exhibits such as Woman feeding her child, where the woman was described as being like a ‘monster’.44 Even Millet’s treatment of his cat in Waiting attracted ridicule for its lack of naturalism, the comtesse de Rethel noting that it seemed
37 ‘C’est une composition pleine d’audace en son extrême simplicité, tout empreinte de ce familiarisme épique dont on ne trouve d’exemple que chez les plus fiers génies [. . .] Il n’y a là, en apparence, rien d’extraordinaire; c’est une scène comme on en peut voir tous les jours, pourtant marquée d’un caractère touchant, d’un sentiment mélancolique et attendri qu’on ne saurait oublier’; T. Pelloquet: ‘Salon de 1861’, Le Courrier du Dimanche (2nd June 1861), p.5. 38 ‘Au premier rang des peintres contemporains brille J. Millet, parce qu’il réunite dans une bonne mesure les qualités essentielles de la forme et du fond. Ne cherchez pas en lui les mievreries d’un art abâtardi, tel que le comprennent MM. Winterhalter et Chaplin, ces imitateurs fades de Boucher et de Lancret, vous ne les trouverez point. Mais si vous aimez l’appréciation vraie des scenes de la vie des champs, si vous accordez quelque valeur aux moeurs de la campagne, alors venez avec nous étudier les trois toiles de Millet, oeuvres pleines de talent et dignes à tous égards de fixer l’attention des connaisseurs’; A. de La Forge: ‘Salon de 1861’, Le Siècle (2nd May 1861). 39 ‘“L’Attente” est une peinture très ferme dans le genre naïf de l’école flamande: seulement il y a plus de grandeur et de mélancolie chez l’artiste français que n’en comporte habituellement le style de Teniers [. . .] Millet a su donner à son aveugle l’air distingué de la misère courageuse. On comprend à l’aspect de cet homme, aussi noble sous ses haillons qu’un hidalgo de
Vélasquez, qu’il n’appartient pas à la classe des industriels fainéans disposes à exploiter la credulité du public’; ibid. 40 ‘Avec des peintres comme Millet, on peut dire hardiment que l’éducation artistique entraînerait aussi une education morale, car sa conscience est mâle et pure, et ce qu’il célèbre, dans ses images austere, c’est d’habitude, le travail, la resignation, la douleur, la vertu’; T. Thoré: ‘Salon de 1861’, in idem: Salons de W. Bürger, Paris 1870, pp.94–95. 41 See Pelloquet, op. cit. (note 37). Thoré described Anna as ‘magistralement charpentée sous sa robe de bure aux plis rares et droits’, while he noted of Tobit that ‘la mimique du vieil aveugle est extraordinaire, de la tête aux pieds’; Thoré, op. cit. (note 40), p.98. 42 ‘Cette peinture suscite des recriminations et soulève des critiques. On reproche à M. Millet de choisir des types vulgaires et laids. C’est là une erreur: il n’y a de vulgaires et de laids que les types dégradés; le spectacle de la forte et courageuse nature élève l’âme, et prépare les emotions bienfaisantes’; A. de la Fizelière: ‘Salon de 1861’, Revue anecdotique (15th June 1861), pp.270–71. 43 See P. de Saint-Victor: ‘Salon de 1861’, La Presse, 7th article (25th June 1861). 44 See de Rethel, op. cit. (note 12), p.191.
27. Departure of Tobias, by Adolphe-William Bouguereau. 1860. Canvas, 153 by 119 cm. (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg).
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of which Courbet would have been proud’ and even saw socialist connotations in Tobit’s red waistcoast.48 Many critics focused on Millet’s use of Barbizon peasants as the painting’s protagonists. The everyday ‘realist’ quality of the work was perpetuated by a repeated critical analogy whereby the figures were described as if waiting for a stagecoach (rather than their son Tobias) in the forest of Fontainebleau, presumably to take them from Barbizon to a nearby village.49 The satirist Louis Leroy, perhaps best known for his later commentaries on the first Impressionist exhibition, summed up conservative opposition in imagining the conversation of three students from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts before the painting:
28. The mother of Tobit watching out for the return of her son, by Nadar and Darjou. From Journal Amusant 286 (22nd June 1861). (Cabinet des Estampes et de la Photographie, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).
Duflan – I ask you! Can these two old peasants represent père Tobit and his wife going out to look for their son? Bittord – Who would have believed it? Who would have said it? Duflan – Oh! For God’s sake! This biblical pretence is becoming far too ridiculous. Read the Books of Paralipomenon [also known as the Book of Chronicles] by all means but please spare us from treating Père Copin and Mère Ganne from Barbizon as characters from the Old Testament. You are only a false naïf, a mannerist in sabots; you don’t praise, you parody! . . . Plateau – I would be curious to know how Millet would dress the angel of Tobias. Duflan – A woollen cloak for a tunic and wings like a back basket and even ‘milletistes’ would find that too fancy!50
like a newly discovered species.45 Théophile Gautier described it as being ‘as fantastic as Japanese chimeras’.46 Waiting attracted especial critical opprobrium because not only was it a scene of peasant genre but also a representation of a hallowed biblical theme. For conservative critics, Millet’s use of peasants was demeaning for a subject in which figures should be treated in a more idealised fashion. The ‘realism’ of Millet’s work was caricatured by Nadar and Darjou, who made an explicit comparison between Millet’s peasants from Barbizon and those of Courbet in his well-known views from Ornans in the Franche-Comté (Fig.28). The caption ran: ‘M. Millet treats the Bible as a realist. Very good! How about M. Courbet deciding tomorrow to transform his Ornans peasants into patriarchs. The very likeable talent of M. Millet can do without such signboards’.47 The caricature itself exaggerated the ‘ugliness’ of Millet’s work – that aspect particularly associated with his ‘realism’. The hand shading Anna’s eyes, for example, is transformed into a bulbous, protruding nose while her chin now juts out markedly. The comparison with Courbet was repeated by other critics, including Jean Rousseau, who described Waiting as ‘an invention
Leroy’s imaginary conversation highlighted the dangerous precedent that Millet’s use of peasant models and rugged peasant costume seemed to offer for the representation of the biblical narrative. His reference to Père Copin, a noted Barbizon peasant, and Mère Ganne, owner of the well-known Auberge Ganne, further highlighted the work’s lowbrow associations. Some, like Leroy’s student, Duflan, even questioned the sincerity of Millet’s intentions. Jean Rousseau suggested that Millet had produced a controversial subject in a controversial manner as a wilful attempt to attract notoriety.51 The comtesse de Rethel accused him of caricaturing the ‘poetic’ history of Tobit while Jane d’Enval suggested that his work was the result of a ‘joke’ or ‘bet’.52 Millet’s painting attracted the most hostile response from conservative Catholic critics. The ultramontane Claudius Lavergne, a painter of religious subjects who favoured the hieratic religious art of Ingres, dismissed the picture as ‘nothing less than the trivial parody of a biblical scene’ and ridiculed the idea that this ‘old woman’ and this ‘old farm servant’ could represent the parents of
45 ‘Et cette poétique histoire de Tobie, l’avez-vous assez caricaturée? Nous vous délivrerons un brevet d’invention pour le chat que vous y avez ajouté, c’est une espèce nouvelle à offrir à M. Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire’; ibid., p.191. 46 ‘Sur un banc, près de la porte, une bête, aussi fantastique que les chimères japonaises à tire-bouchons bleus, se hausse sur ses pattes et fait le gros dos’; T. Gautier: L’Abécédaire du Salon de 1861, Paris 1861, p.286. 47 ‘La Mère de Tobie Guettant le Retour de son fils. M. Millet traite la Bible en réaliste. A la bonne heure, si M. Courbet se décidé demain à transformer ses paysans d’Ornans en patriarches d’Israël – Le talent si profondément sympathique de M. Millet peut se passer de ces sortes d’enseignes’; Nadar: ‘Jury au Salon de 1861’, Journal Amusant 286 (22nd June 1861). 48 ‘Ainsi ce gilet rouge est le père de Tobie? Mais, en vérité, voilà une invention dont M. Courbet sera jaloux! Apparemment, si l’ange venait, ce serait un ange en redingote. La Bible en paletots! Dieu le père en carrick! C’est une mine, cela. Comment ne s’en est-on pas avisé plus tôt?’; Rousseau, op. cit. (note 36), p.6. 49 Ibid.; the Catholic critic Léon Lagrange also noted that the figures seemed to be waiting for an ‘omnibus’; L. Lagrange: ‘Le Salon de 1861 (4e article)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 11/3 (July 1861), p.63. 50 ‘Duflan. – Comment! Ces deux vieux paysans de l’Attente représentent le père Tobie et sa femme allant au devant de leur fils? Bittord. – Qui l’eût crû? Qui l’eût dit? Duflan. – Ah!
sapristi! Cette prétention biblique devient par trop ridicule. Lisez les Paralipomènes, je le veux bien, mais gardez-vous de nous donner le père Copin et la mère Ganne de Barbizon pour des personnages de l’Ancien Testament. Vous n’êtes qu’un faux naïf, un maniériste en sabots; vous ne louangez pas, vous parodiez! . . . Plateau. – Je serais curieux de savoir de quel costume Millet affublerait l’ange de Tobie. Duflan. – Une limousine pour tunique, des ailes en forme de hotte, et il se rencontrerait encore des milletistes pour trouver cela un peu colifichet!’; L. Leroy: ‘Salon de 1861’, ‘L’esthétique des rapins’, Le Charivari (15th May 1861). 51 See Rousseau, op. cit. (note 36), pp.5–6. 52 See J. d’Enval: Salon de 1861, Paris 1861, p.55. 53 ‘. . . la parodie triviale d’une scène biblique [. . .] Le livret nous apprend que cette vieille et cotillion, à la posture indescriptible, ce vieux valet de ferme en culotte courte et gilet rouge, aveugle, perclus, éreinté [. . .] ce sont les parents de Tobie attendant le retour de leur fils bien-aimé’; C. Lavergne: ‘Exposition de 1861’, Le Monde (23rd May 1861). 54 Ibid.; for a recent discussion of Lagrange, see V. Jirat-Wasiutyski: ‘Decentralising the History of French Art: Léon Lagrange on Provençal Art’, Oxford Art Journal 31/2 (2008), pp.215–31. 55 The conservative critic Bathild Bouniol, in reviewing religious painting at the Salon for the Catholic journal, the Revue du monde catholique, noted the absence of major religious art, citing relatively minor and now forgotten figures such as James
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Tobias.53 Léon Lagrange, a Catholic critic, described Millet as a ‘blind revolutionary’ whose work radicalised the religious painting tradition but offered little hope for the future of the genre, arguing that the use of local peasant models might be admissible in popular art forms – such as the sculptures of biblical figures in provençal Christmas tableaux – but not in a work which aspired to stand as high art within the realm of the Salon.54 For Lagrange, Millet’s treatment of the biblical story was prosaic, containing none of the spiritual mystery associated with the theme. Such hostility may in fact have been exacerbated by Catholic insecurity about the state of more conventional religious painting, as well as the broader place of the Catholic Church in French society at a time when Napoleon III seemed increasingly at odds with the papacy.55 The Catholic aristocrat Paul de Saint-Victor saw the picture as emblematic of a wider decline of the times and compared it to the newly founded religion of Mormonism,
whose missionaries had first reached France in the late 1840s and had soon been identified as a radical, utopian creed with Communist associations.56 Saint-Victor wrote of Millet’s painting: ‘I see there a sign of the times, something of this prosaic barbarity which has created the gross theology of the Mormons in the United States [. . .] There is Mormonism in the painting of M. Millet. – This is how a painter from the Salt Lake would understand and represent scenes from the Bible’.57 From his correspondence with Sensier we know that Millet kept himself well informed of the criticism of his work. In response to the tirades and attacks of Saint-Victor, a critic who had supported him in the early 1850s, he wrote: ‘To tell the truth, I prefer the way in which X [Saint-Victor] now speaks to me to being loaded with his praises. His long string of empty words, his hollow flatteries, gave me the sensation of swallowing pomatum! I would just as soon be rid of him at the cost of a little mire. If I wore pumps, I might find the road muddy, but in my sabots, I think I can get along’.58 Such words were emblematic of his outsider identity and antipathy to the city and its transient fashions. In 1862 Millet was photographed by Eugène Cuvelier, standing in front of his garden wall in his customary sabots (Fig.29). The artist apparently relished the remark made by Sensier that he looked like a peasant leader about to be shot.59 Although he denied any socialist impetus behind his work, Millet did emphasise the moral power of his message and, as he noted, its ability to ‘troubler les heureux dans leur repos’.60 At the next Salon he exhibited an even more controversial work, Man with a hoe (J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, Los Angeles), indicating that he was not deterred by the controversy of 1861. In the years after Millet’s death, Waiting increasingly lost its radical charge, particularly through its association with the piety of the Angelus.61 Millet’s own rebarbative identity was also neutralised by biographical constructs that put forward a conservative, over pious vision of the artist in an attempt to make his work more marketable.62 Yet, as we have seen, when placed within its original context the painting carried considerable shock value, as can be seen in the repeated charges of ‘ugliness’, of associations with Socialism and the outsider religious creed of Mormonism. During a period when discourse at the annual Salon centred on idealised episodes from the Bible, Waiting signalled a ‘realist’ and antiacademic riposte by using non-professional peasant models in a blatantly rural setting. And just as Courbet is lauded for the avant-garde character of his work, Millet, in Waiting, provided an equally powerful example of progressive and challenging art.
Bertrand, Eugène Laville and Charles Timbal. He did not discuss Millet’s work and noted ‘La peinture religieuse est médiocrement représentée au salon et par un nombre restreint de toiles [. . .] sous prétexte de fidélité à la tradition, tous les personnages sont jetés dans un moule connu, convenu, banal, usé, tous les types paraissent pris sur le même modèle’; B. Bouniol: ‘Nos impressions au Salon de 1861’, Revue du monde catholique 1/5 (6th June 1861), p.292. 56 The first Mormon missionary arrived in France in 1849. In 1853 Prosper Mérimée published a series of articles entitled ‘Les Mormons’ in the official journal of the Second Empire, the Moniteur Universel. Describing Mormons crossing the plains, Mérimée noted: ‘Le riche partageait son pain avec le pauvre [. . .] et de tells actes ont valu aux Mormons le reproche de communisme’; cited in C.L. Cropper: ‘Fictional Documentary: the Other as France in Mérimée’s “Les Mormons”’, in B. Norman, ed.: The Documentary Impulse in French Literature, Amsterdam/Atlanta GA 2001, pp.51–64. 57 ‘J’y vois encore un signe du temps, quelque chose de cette barbarie prosaïque qui a créé aux États-Unis la théologie grossière des Mormons. Dans cette religion commercial, Dieu mange et boit; il a des femmes et des enfants; des anges en paletot apparaissent à des Prophètes qui sortent de la Bourse. Le pontife monte en chaire pour precher sur le cours du cotton et le perfec-
tionnnement du drainage – Il y a du mormonisme dans le tableau de M. Millet: c’est ainsi qu’un peintre du Lac salé comprendrait et représenterait les scenes de la Bible’; Saint-Victor, op. cit. (note 43). 58 Translation from J.M. Cartwright: Jean-François Millet, His Life and Letters, New York 1896, p.213, quoting letter of Millet to Sensier (undated), in Sensier, op. cit. (note 17), p.217. 59 Sensier remembered Millet’s reaction to this photograph: ‘Il en était assez content et, quand je lui dis: “Vous ressemblez à un chef de paysans qu’on va fusiller”, il me regarde comme un homme presque fier de cette traduction’; ibid., p.219. 60 This letter, undated but written c.1863, is reproduced in Moreau-Nélaton, op. cit. (note 7), pp.138–39. 61 It has, however, been argued that the work inspired André Gide to write his short story Le Retour de l’enfant prodigne (1907). Gide probably saw Waiting in 1892 at the gallery of Georges Petit in Paris; see D. Steel: ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son: Gide, Millet and “les marches du perron”’, Word and Image 17/4 (October to December 2001), pp.379–88. 62 See N. McWilliam and C. Parsons: ‘Le Paysan de Paris: Alfred Sensier and the Myth of Rural France’, Oxford Art Journal 6/2 (1983), pp.38–58.
29. Jean-François Millet. Photograph by Eugène Cuvelier. 1862. (From E. MoreauNélaton: Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris 1921, II, fig.170).
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‘Dans un café’, ‘Zigzags’ and five recovered Impressionist drawings by RICHARD KENDALL
EDGAR DEGAS’S PAINTING Dans un café (Fig.30), also known as L’Absinthe, is one of his least satisfactorily documented major achievements. Often seen as a definitive statement of the artist’s urban realism in the 1870s, it is widely associated with the series of Impressionist exhibitions that began in that decade. As such, Dans un café has acquired a role in the emerging iconography of the age, in the imagery of his immediate followers such as JeanLouis Forain and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in the fin-desiècle repertory of Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Pablo Picasso and others. Yet the recorded history of the picture lacks conclusive evidence that it was shown in any of the Impressionist displays or at other venues in France before the early twentieth century. Scholars have confirmed its presence elsewhere, however, notably in the near-seclusion of an English provincial collection, where it arrived soon after Degas completed it. Remaining there for almost sixteen years, the painting was then bought by a major collector in Paris, comte Isaac de Camondo, who kept it until 1908. The implicit absence of Dans un café from public sight in Degas’s milieu during much of his life offers a fundamental challenge: if the painting was not seen by his contemporaries, either in the original or in some reproduced form, can it still be regarded as a seminal contribution to Impressionism and to the development of early modernism as a whole? A short-lived, largely overlooked journal of the period and a forgotten image of Dans un café allow us to revisit these questions and amplify the surrounding narrative. Part of this inquiry concerns the mechanisms of artistic influence at this time, the circulation of works in reproduction and the role of printmaking, photography and other procedures in an evolving creative context. Any review of Degas’s painting must begin with the details of its atypical early history and the modest traces of its creation found in documentary sources. A sketchbook used by the artist between 1875 and 1877 indicates that Dans un café was painted in the period leading up to the second Impressionist exhibition, which opened at the Durand-Ruel galleries in Paris in late March 1876. Three pages of the sketchbook show summary drawings of a café interior and other details related to the project, among them a list of five pictures that Degas was soon to show in the exhibition.1 One of these is entitled Dans un café, a description inapplicable to any large, finished painting or pastel by the artist from these years other than the work under discussion now in the Musée d’Orsay. A reference in his sketchbook to the dimensions of the canvas being 90 by 67 cm. confirms this identification, while the note ‘Hélène et Desboutins’ has helped to establish that the models were the actress Ellen André and the artist and printmaker Marcellin Desboutin.2
Such quick sketches and notes for works in hand were often central to Degas’s procedure at this time; remarkably, no other preparatory drawings for the innovative composition of Dans un café have been discovered. His list of pictures also reminds us of the deliberation with which Degas approached the exhibition process and selected his contributions. For the inaugural show of the Impressionists in 1874, for example, he had chosen ten works that presented key aspects of his current activity to an unfamiliar audience and spelled out his techniques of the moment: oil painting, pastel and drawing. The resulting installation of horserace and ballet scenes, laundresses and a solitary nude was spared much of the disapproval levelled at his
I am indebted to Jill DeVonyar for her assistance in the preparation of this article and to Richard Brettell, Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, John House, Sarah Lees, Joachim Pissarro, Theodore Reff, Anne Roquebert and Hugues Wilhelm for their help with my enquiries. 1 T. Reff: The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, Oxford 1976, I, notebook 26, pp.74, 87 and
90; the list of pictures is on p.74. 2 Ibid., p.90. 3 R. Berson: The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, San Francisco 1996, I, p.9. 4 Ibid., I, pp.9–10. 5 Ibid., II, p.48.
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30. Dans un café (L’Absinthe), by Edgar Degas. 1876. Canvas, 92 by 68 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
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colleagues. One critic writing under the name ‘Ariste’ for L’Indépendence Belge hailed Degas as ‘the most remarkable of all these painters’, whose works were ‘astonishing’ for their ‘scrupulous truth’.3 Philippe Burty, the collector and print expert, observed that Degas ‘was the promoter of the enterprise’ who ‘has had all the success’, while several others singled out his works on paper for special admiration.4 Degas was evidently determined to capitalise on this response as he prepared for the second joint exhibition in the spring of 1876. Now the unillustrated catalogue itemised two dozen of his pictures, some introducing new and more abrasive subject-matter, and many with precisely defined technical identities. Certain exhibits were listed as ‘pastel’, ‘esquisse’, ‘ébauche’ or ‘dessin’, while a Blanchisseuse was further specified as a ‘silhouette’ and one item appeared as ‘Divers croquis de danseuses’.5 Following convention, titles in the catalogue left without such qualifications were assumed to refer to oil paintings. Among these was Dans un café, one of several works that drew attention to Degas’s virtuoso handling of the oil medium in his 1876 submissions. These embraced vivid evocations of light and shadow and extreme contrasts in finish, from the detail and refinement of Portraits dans un bureau (Nouvelle Orléans) to the gestural, seemingly unresolved surface of Cour d’un maison (Nouvelle Orléans).6 In this company Dans un café would have seemed entirely at home, although its brusque facture and confrontational theme remained audacious by most contemporary standards. For unexplained reasons, however, and clearly at the last minute, the decision was made to withhold Dans un café from this exhibition. None of the more than sixty critics who either mentioned this event briefly or wrote about it at length made reference to Degas’s painting, which was too large and too insistent as a subject to have been overlooked. Notoriously equivocal in such situations, he may have failed to complete the canvas to his satisfaction or suddenly developed other plans for it. A letter dated 15th May 1876, written by Degas two weeks after the exhibition had closed, reveals that Dans un café – here referred to by the artist as ‘L’Intérieur de café’ – had by this time been sent to Charles Deschamps, a dealer working for Durand-Ruel in London. ‘I am in need of money’, Degas told Deschamps, who had already sold pictures for him, before explaining how the imperfectly dry picture should be handled.7 Within months Dans un café had been added to the collection of Henry Hill, who lived in Brighton, and was temporarily exhibited there as ‘A Sketch in a French Café’.8 One English critic claimed to be shocked by the ‘disgusting novelty of the subject’, a foretaste of the scandal that accompanied the painting in later decades.9 Despite this brief appearance in England in 1876, therefore, and excepting those who may have seen the picture taking shape in Degas’s studio, evidence suggests that Dans un café still remained unknown to the Paris art world. It is at this point that an obscure contemporary journal opens up fresh perspectives on Dans un café and the uncertainties that surround it. Entitled Zigzags à la plume à travers l’art (Fig.31), the publication appeared for just five months between April and September 1876, initially every week and then twice a month as
6 7 8 9 10
P.-A. Lemoisne: Degas et son œuvre, Paris 1946–49, II, nos.320 and 309. T. Reff: ‘Some Unpublished Letters of Degas’, Art Bulletin 50/1 (1968), p.90. See R. Pickvance: ‘“L’Absinthe” in England’, Apollo 77 (May 1963), pp.395–96. Ibid., p.396. Berson, op. cit. (note 3), I, p.19.
31. Zigzags à la plume à travers l’art 5 (28th May 1876), p.1.
closure loomed. The editor was Ernest Chesneau, the experienced arts administrator and writer who had been cautious about the latest advances in painting but gradually relented, not least in the case of Degas. During the artist’s early public career, Chesneau repeatedly singled out his work for praise and when writing about the 1874 Impressionist show noted with approval that ‘Degas draws in a precise, exact fashion’.10 The full extent of Chesneau’s contribution to Zigzags is unclear, although some of his preferences seem to be reflected in the sceptical tone adopted towards contemporary culture. Zigzags was made up of sixteen cheaply produced pages of news about exhibitions, gossip from vernissages and mildly ironic features on current French art and artists. It was launched on 30th April 1876, coincidentally during the weekend that the second Impressionist show appears to have closed its doors.11 On this occasion almost half the magazine was devoted to the impending Salon, as a pseudonymous author – who signed himself ‘Broc’ – described the arrival at the Palais de l’industrie of the latest submissions.12 Works by such notable figures as Léon Bonnat, Alexandre Cabanel and
11 No precise dates are recorded for this event, but from the collected reviews it seems that the exhibition opened on 30th or 31st March and closed some four weeks later; see ibid., I, pp.53–113. 12 Zigzags à la plume à travers l’art 1 (30th April 1876), pp.1–7.
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William Bouguereau were carried past or were seen propped against the walls, along with pictures by those closer to the Impressionist circle: Félix Bracquemond, Henri Fantin-Latour and Degas’s friend Alphonse Hirsch. Blocking one doorway and watching their elders, we are told by ‘Broc’, were ‘Degas, Monet, Duranty and Caillebotte, the apostles of the art of the future’.13 Notable in Zigzags are the large number of monochrome illustrations scattered throughout its pages, the majority based on pen-and-ink drawings, and characteristically spanning the documentary and the flippant. An editorial statement on 30th July acknowledged that they were principally by ‘Zag and Brac, two pseudonyms behind which some have immediately recognised two of our most spirited painters’.14 Many of the drawings bear the signature ‘Broc’ – sometimes rendered as ‘Brik’ or ‘Brac’ – and others are credited to ‘Zag’, ‘Zig’ and ‘Z.Z.’, while a few images in different styles indicate the work of other hands.15 The
same editorial belatedly explained that one of the journal’s aims was to champion the dessin d’artiste, by avoiding ‘interpretations that are often skilful but rarely faithful’ and aspiring to retain the character of ‘the draughtsman’s pen line’.16 This policy may already have borne fruit in two earlier issues, in which there appeared a selection of drawings associated with pictures from the recent Impressionist exhibition. On 7th May, for example, a page with ‘Souvenirs de L’Exposition des Réalistes’ displayed a group of sketches, each with its catalogue number and title: ‘No 209. – FEMME ET ENFANT, par M. RENOIR’, ‘No 161. – LA PROMENADE, par M. MONET’ and ‘No 203. – LES COTEAUX DU CHOUX, par CAMILLE PISSARRO’ (Fig.32).17 There was no commentary on the drawings or on the exhibition itself in this or subsequent issues, but a further two studies were printed on opposite pages in the 28th May edition: at left, ‘No 17. – RABOTEUR DE PARQUETS, par M. Gustave CAILLEBOTTE’ (Fig.33) and at right ‘No 52. – DANS UN CAFÉ, par M. Edgard [sic] DEGAS’ (Fig.35).18 As the earliest known set of reproduced drawings related to the Impressionist venture, this intriguing selection is of some historical interest, although the significance of the individual images is far from straightforward. In all five examples the numbers and other information printed beneath the illustration in Zigzags correspond closely to the brief details provided for each painting in the 1876 catalogue.19 Varying significantly from case to case, however, is the relationship of these reproductions to the works on canvas in question. Arguably the simplest is Dans un café, which is a freely executed but essentially faithful transcription of the forms and tonal character of Degas’s canvas. Equally recognisable is the delicately drawn subject of Raboteurs de parquets, a figure that appears in the smaller of Caillebotte’s two paintings with that title, albeit reversed laterally.20 Although considerably looser in handling, La promenade clearly represents a miniature version of the picture by Monet shown in 1876, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.21 Even more abrupt as a drawing is Les Coteaux du Choux, which does not coincide with the paintings by Pissarro that have previously been linked to this title in studies of the second Impressionist exhibition.22 The vignette-like sketch of Renoir’s Femme et enfant also calls for some reconsideration through its connections to a work that has not formerly been identified with this event.23 For those readers of Zigzags who had visited the exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s gallery before the 28th May issue appeared, it would have been apparent that at least one of the drawings published in these pages – that of Dans un café – represented a picture that was not shown in that display. It could be argued that Chesneau’s decision to publish the image of Degas’s painting indicates that it was briefly exhibited before being dispatched to London, although the lack of corroborating evidence in the press and elsewhere continues to make this unlikely. More prosaically,
13
21
32. Zigzags à la plume à travers l’art 2 (7th May 1876), p.13.
Ibid., p.6. Ibid., 13 (30th July 1876), p.1. 15 See, for example, the drawing attributed to Maxime Lalanne in ibid., p.13, and the image of Henri Régnault’s painting Salomé in ibid., 15 (27th August 1876), p.13. 16 Ibid., 13 (30th July 1876), p.1. 17 Ibid., 2 (7th May 1876), p.13. 18 Ibid., 5 (28th May 1876), pp.12–13. 19 The number ascribed to Pissarro’s painting, 203, is incorrect; in the exhibition catalogue it is listed as 202; see Berson, op. cit. (note 3), II, p.51. 20 M. Berhaut: Caillebotte, sa vie et son œuvre, Paris 1978, p.86, no.29. This illustration is reproduced in A. Distel et al.: Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, Chicago 1995, p.42. Both of Caillebotte’s paintings were shown in 1876. 14
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D. Wildenstein: Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne and Paris 1974–91, I, p.278, no.381. 22 In C. Moffett: exh. cat. The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, Washington (National Gallery) 1986, p.164, it is suggested that Cowherd on the Route de Chou, Pontoise in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, may have been the work exhibited; see L.-R. Pissarro and L. Venturi: Camille Pissarro: son art, son œuvre, Paris 1939, I, p.116, no.260. Both Moffett and Berson, op. cit. (note 3), II, p.43, also propose Pissarro and Venturi, no.370 as a candidate. 23 No pictures are linked with this work in either Moffett 1986 or Berson, op. cit. (note 3). 24 G.-P. and M. Dauberville: Renoir: catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, 1858–1881, Paris 2007, no.250. Detailed discrepancies between the canvas
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33. Zigzags à la plume à travers l’art 5 (28th May 1876), p.12.
34. The floor scrapers, by Gustave Caillebotte. 1876. Canvas, 80 by 100 cm. (Private collection).
the drawing for the illustration may have been created some weeks earlier, when Dans un café was being completed for the impending show, then simply retained for future use regardless of the picture’s departure for England. Two of the reproductions from the 7th May issue, on the other hand, seem to indicate works that were indeed exhibited in – or intended for – the second Impressionist exhibition, but have been incorrectly identified in the past. Unsurprisingly, attempts to track down the vaguely titled Femme et enfant have proved fruitless, but the strong resemblance between Renoir’s sketch and his large canvas of 1876, Le premier pas, now establishes that this was the picture in question.24 While plausible candidates have been proposed for Pissarro’s Les Coteaux du Choux, there is equally little doubt that it was his 1874 Allée des pommiers près d’Osny, Pontoise, which is identical in structure to the Zigzags illustration, that appeared on this occasion.25 The authors of the five drawings used for these illustrations in Zigzags are not specified in the journal’s pages. Many features of the printed images set them apart from others that appeared in the short run of Zigzags: none shares the vocabulary of loose, facile penmanship adopted by the resident draughtsmen – ‘Brac’, ‘Zag’ and their alter egos – and none carries the signatures of these latter individuals. Two examples from the set of five, however, seem to be explicitly identified on the drawings themselves as works by the artists responsible for the paintings they represent. The reproduction entitled Les Coteaux du Choux has Pissarro’s initials at lower left (the related canvas is signed at right) and careful scrutiny of the printed Dans un café reveals Degas’s characteristic signature in a similar position, although slightly
and the Zigzags illustration suggest that the latter may be based on a preparatory study or drawing for this painting, which is dated 1876. There were no clear references to this work in the published criticism, although it should be noted that Renoir’s contributions were reviewed very briefly in 1876. The suggestion that Le premier pas was shown in 1876, based on records in the Durand-Ruel archive, is made in J. House: Impressionism: Paint and Politics, New Haven and London 2004, p.165 and pp.231–32, note 39. 25 This work was not known to Pissarro and Venturi; see J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts: Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, Paris 2005, I, p.263, no.338. Pissarro was the least reviewed of the leading Impressionist artists in 1876, although a number of statements about his pictures by critics would have applied to this painting.
higher and further to the left than in his painting. Such details appear to link these drawings with Chesneau’s promotion of the dessin d’artiste, in which the intermediary hand of an engraver was omitted and the painter’s own lines were translated directly onto the page. Also consistent with this view are the clearly differentiated graphic styles and local touches in these two studies, from the bold linearity of the Pissarro to the complex, shadowy inflections of the Degas. This range is extended in the three remaining images, embracing the distinctive traces of pencil, pen and brush, as well as a number of idiosyncratic textural effects. In every instance, the qualities apparent in the Zigzags reproductions bear close comparison with known drawings by the relevant artist. The illustration after Caillebotte is the most finely nuanced, its soft strokes evoking the use of graphite on laid paper and directly recalling the group of studies that survive for this and other figures in his Raboteurs de parquets pictures.26 At the other extreme, Pissarro’s broadly executed pencil and pen sketches of the landscape from the 1870s, which often accentuate the angular play of trees and branches, offer a compelling precedent for the stark printed image of Les Coteaux du Choux.27 In Femme et enfant, the fine, rhythmic hatching echoes Renoir’s rare pen studies of these years, such as the works known as La balançoire, Lise and Illustration for Emile Zola’s ‘L’Assomoir’, all executed between 1877 and 1878.28 Likewise, the version of La promenade that appears in Zigzags brings to mind Monet’s vigorously simplified pen copy of his picture Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur,
26 See J. Chardeau: Les dessins de Caillebotte, Paris 1989, pp.22–25. This group of drawings includes studies for both figures in the smaller Raboteurs de parquets. Among them are two sheets that depict the younger man fully clothed and sitting on the floor, but none of him naked above the waist, as he appears in the painting. The example reproduced in Zigzags, therefore, represents a missing stage in Caillebotte’s preparation for this canvas. 27 See for example Pissarro and Venturi, op. cit. (note 22), II, no.408; and R. Brettell and C. Lloyd: Catalogue of the drawings by Camille Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1980, nos.68E (recto and verso), 85B–G and 95. 28 See J. Rewald: Renoir drawings, New York 1946, nos.2–4. Lise is especially close in technique to the Zigzags illustration.
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made a decade earlier, as well as a later drawing in black chalk of another variant of La promenade.29 Especially significant is the fact that most of the Renoir and Monet drawings cited in these comparisons were created as illustrations for publication projects. Monet’s pen sketch had been reproduced in the 1865 edition of L’Autographe au Salon, in which hundreds of linear renderings of paintings were printed through the gillotage process.30 La balançoire, the drawing by Renoir, was based by the artist on his own canvas of that title and appeared in the journal L’Impressionniste in 1877, although the attempt at an illustration to Zola’s novel came to nothing.31 This decade was one of widespread printmaking activity by younger artists who were anxious to bring their work to a larger public, some exploiting recent progress in the cheap reproduction of paintings for the popular press. Members of the Impressionist group were involved in many of these initiatives and are known to have called on the experience of senior colleagues such as Desboutin.32 The illustrations in Zigzags seem to have been their first joint appearance of this kind, although it was quickly followed by others. Drawings after works by Caillebotte, Degas and Sisley, attributed on the page to the artists themselves, also appeared in L’Impressionniste in 1877, two of them identified as works related to pictures in the current exhibition.33 In 1879 Cassatt and Degas were involved in comparable endeavours, both supplying drawings for La Vie Moderne and Les Beaux-Arts Illustrés.34 The eagerness of the Impressionist painters to co-operate with the dissemination of their work in printed form was precociously evident in Zigzags, although the nature of their contributions differed from artist to artist. Caillebotte, who was exhibiting in 1876 for the first time, provided an existing drawing of a single element in one of his most recent paintings, its finesse made apparent in a large illustration across the width of a page (Figs.33 and 34). At the opposite extreme, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir were each represented by studies of a single canvas, shown in their entirety and greatly simplified to remain legible on a reduced scale. Given Chesneau’s commitment to artists’ original drawings and the fact that all three images bear the hallmarks of these individuals’ graphic styles, it seems likely that Monet, Pissarro and Renoir – like Caillebotte – were the authors of the works on paper that appeared in print. Several factors point to the singling out of Dans un café for special treatment. Alone among the five illustrations used by Chesneau, the rendering of Degas’s painting almost fills an entire page, its size and pronounced chiaroscuro indicating a work of some gravity by ‘the promoter’ of the Impressionist enterprise. The drawing appears
29 The drawing of La promenade is not listed in Wildenstein, op. cit. (note 21), but see also Femme à l’ombrelle in ibid., V, p.131, no.D.446. For Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur, see ibid., V, p.124, no.D.423. 30 See J. Ganz and R. Kendall: The Unknown Monet, New Haven and London 2007, pp.186–88. 31 See Berson, op. cit. (note 3), I, p.199. 32 For a detailed study of this phenomenon with particular reference to Degas, see D. Druick and P. Zegers: ‘The Peintre-Graveur as Peintre-Entrepreneur, 1875–80’, in S.W. Reed and B.S. Shapiro et al.: exh. cat. Edgar Degas: The Painter as Printmaker, Boston (Museum of Fine Arts), Philadelphia (Museum of Art) and London (Hayward Gallery) 1984–85, pp.xxviii–lv. 33 See Berson, op. cit. (note 3), I, pp.195, 198 and 200.
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35. Zigzags à la plume à travers l’art 5 (28th May 1876), p.13.
to have been contrived with such a scale in mind, incorporating extensive detail and subtleties of effect that would have been lost in a smaller printed image. On the notebook page next to his list of pictures for the 1876 exhibition, Degas recorded a rendezvous with Chesneau and the printer Martinet, perhaps to discuss such technicalities.35 As with his colleagues and for similar reasons, it is therefore highly probable that the depiction in ink of Dans un café used in Zigzags and emphatically signed by the artist was made by Degas himself.36 Throughout the 1870s Degas was conspicuously active as a maker of drawings and prints in a variety of novel modes, showing several selections at the Impressionist exhibitions. Already a
34
See ibid., I, pp.254 and 256. Reff, op. cit. (note 1), p.73. 36 No dimensions are given in Zigzags for the study from Dans un café, or for any of the other drawings in question, though the appearance of the reproductions themselves and comparison with similar works by these artists suggests that the original drawings were significantly reduced in the printing process. 37 A brush drawing with many similarities of touch to the Zigzags illustration of Dans un café is Sketches of dancers, c.1876–77; see M.B. Cohn and J.S. Boggs: Degas at Harvard, Cambridge MA 2005, p.114, no.49. 38 E.P. Janis: Degas Monotypes: Essay, Catalogue and Checklist, Greenwich 1968, nos.58–60. 39 Ibid., nos.233 and 41–45. 35
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master of the pen, he used black ink inventively in independent works on paper and in the lithographs and monotypes he began to produce at this time.37 His first monotypes appeared in 1876 and were often created with the tip or side of a brush dipped in ink, as well as with wiping, dabbing and scraping techniques. A number of these early prints had both practical and thematic connections to Dans un café: three striking examples – two with substantial additions in pastel – show forlorn customers in cafés and bars, and are paradoxically among the closest of all Degas’s creations to the oil painting itself.38 Another small monotype represents a head and shoulders portrait of Desboutin, which has often been compared to the male figure in his canvas, while a sequence of similar prints probably represent Ellen André.39 The drawing made for Zigzags seems to bridge the gap between all these media. More than the images made by his colleagues, Degas’s illustration aspired to capture the complexity of a work in oil, summarising its marked tactility and adding what seem to be areas of tone applied as a monochrome wash or even heightened with colour. Drafted in pen, the drawing was developed with the point of a brush in such passages as the gathered folds of André’s dress, her economically defined shoe and the solid planes of black in her companion’s suit. So assiduous is the draughtsmanship that certain dark areas, such as that immediately to the left of the carafe, were also finely scratched with a sharp point or drawn over with pale ink as the composition progressed, an effect sometimes found in lithographs. The printed image, reproduced in such a way as to convey its textures and shifts from light to dark, is nevertheless far from pedantic in representing Degas’s painting.40 Variations in the silhouette of Desboutin’s hat and – even more tellingly – in the position of the signature, point to a ‘free copy’ rather than a pedantic transcription in the orthodox manner.41 What does this illustration tell us about the history of Dans un café and its status in the spring of 1876? Unless Degas had arranged to have the canvas photographed, a practice he followed occasionally at this period, the drawing must have been made before Dans un café left for England.42 Appearing in Zigzags on 28th May, this far-from-perfect reproduction would thus have been the sole available image of Degas’s painting that remained in the public forum in France. Circulation figures for Zigzags are not known, but the journal inevitably placed this printed version of Dans un café in the hands of a number of his contemporaries, among them fellow artists and other figures in the Paris art world. As we have seen, such images were still distinctly novel in the Impressionist camp and – at the very least – would have helped to fix the painting in the minds of those
few already aware of it, while spreading word of Degas’s composition to a wider audience. During these months and indeed for some years afterwards, there was almost no other source of imagery for the pictures that had been exhibited at the DurandRuel gallery in the spring of 1876. The availability of Dans un café in printed form thus constitutes a crucial chapter in its early history, if one of uncertain duration. A final twist to the story of Dans un café concerns the Impressionist exhibition held the following year. Among the record number of critics who wrote about the 1877 show, some at considerable length, four left brief traces in their reviews of pictures that partly correspond to Dans un café.43 Two of these cases, which mention works that seem to have shared important elements of its subject-matter, have been cited as proof that Degas’s painting was present on this occasion.44 For this to be possible, it is argued that the canvas must have been borrowed from Henry Hill and brought to Paris especially for the 1877 exhibition, then returned to Brighton, although it is acknowledged that no traces of such a manoeuvre survive. Intriguing though this scenario continues to be, it fails to account for the muted response in the press to the conspicuously challenging Dans un café, on an occasion when almost all Degas’s submissions were extensively and vigorously discussed. Another possibility that has been overlooked is specifically prompted by the critics’ passing remarks. Three of the four writers in 1877 – the pair most frequently considered and a third not previously noted in this context – refer to the picture by Degas related to Dans un café as a work on paper. Frédéric Chevalier included it among Degas’s ‘most strangely veracious drawings’, before describing the ‘disturbing woman’ seated in a café beside an ‘etcher’.45 Amédée Descubes wrote of a ‘watercolour’ by Degas in which the expressions of two figures ‘at the door of a café’ were ‘marvellously rendered’, while ‘Bernadille’ spoke broadly of scenes of ‘bar tables’, ‘café-concerts’ and other motifs that were part of Degas’s group of ‘watercolours’.46 Allowance should be made for the artist’s reputation as an exhibitor of drawings, pastels, monotypes and works in hybrid techniques whose physical identities sometimes confused the public. But it is still difficult to imagine even the most hurried or unperceptive critic mistaking Degas’s three-foot-high, darkhued and richly brushed canvas Dans un café for a ‘drawing’ or a ‘watercolour’. More plausible, perhaps, is the notion that Degas, with his painting now immured in England, had chosen to exhibit the only version of this image available to him in Paris: the drawing on paper that was reproduced a year earlier in the pages of Zigzags.
40 In contrast to the earlier Zigzags images of works by Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, a more sophisticated printing technique capable of registering tonal gradations and fine detail was clearly used for reproducing the Caillebotte and Degas drawings. 41 There are indications in an X-radiograph of Dans un café that such differences may record an earlier stage of Degas’s picture; the angle of the table at lower left, for example, is a little steeper in both the X-radiograph and the Zigzags illustration; see also J.S. Boggs et al.: exh. cat. Degas, Paris (Grand Palais), Ottawa (National Gallery of Canada) and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1988–89, p.288. 42 See T. Reff in sale, Christie’s, Paris, Art Impressionniste et Moderne, dont un ensemble d’oeuvre provenant de l’atelier Degas, 24th May 2006, p.50, for references to two such photographs from this decade. 43 The reviews were by ‘Bernadille’, Frédéric Chevalier and Amédée Descubes, repr.
in Berson, op. cit. (note 3), I, pp.29–31; pp.137–40; and pp.143–44 respectively; and by Eugène Loudun in Revue du Monde Catholique, 25th June 1877. In his list of disreputable subjects in Degas’s display, Loudun refers to ‘des buveurs et des buveuses d’absinthe, accoudé à une table, sans se regarder, sans se parler, sans penser . . .’. I am most grateful to Hugues Wilhelm for alerting me to the latter text. 44 Chevalier and others are referred to in this context in Boggs et al., op. cit. (note 41), p.288; G. Tinterow and A. Norton: ‘Degas aux expositions “impressionnistes”’, in H. Loyrette, ed.: Degas Inédit, Paris 1989, p.313; and Berson, op. cit. (note 3), II, p.74. For the argument concerning the loan from Hill, see Boggs et al., op. cit. (note 41), p.286. 45 See Berson, op. cit. (note 3), I, p.139. 46 See ibid., I, pp.144 and 130. the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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between the interpretation of Gustave Moreau recently developed by Moreau specialists and the more traditional view maintained by histories of art, dictionaries of art and books and exhibition catalogues devoted to fin-de-siècle culture. According to the latter, Moreau was either a precursor of or a fully fledged participant in the nebulous movement known as Symbolism.1 The matter is further complicated by Moreau’s long-standing association with Decadence.2 For Moreau specialists, on the other hand, the painter of Œdipus and the sphinx and Salome was, above all, an innovative history painter.3 The purpose of this article is to clarify Moreau’s relationship with both Symbolism and Decadence. First, however, it will be helpful to summarise the current views of Moreau specialists. Thanks to the conquests of the revisionist perspective, it has recently become possible to re-examine Moreau’s relationship with history painting, formerly the despised, pompier ‘other’ in opposition to which avant-garde art defined itself. This re-examination has shown conclusively that Moreau’s roots and ambitions lay squarely in the domain of history painting, or ‘le grand art’, as he called it.4 Trained in the studio of the academic painter François Edouard Picot, Moreau set out to revitalise le grand art, which, in mid-nineteenth-century France, was undergoing a period of prolonged crisis.5 Undermined by academic sterility on the one hand and the insidious blending of genres on the other, history painting was losing faith in itself, while the buying and exhibition-going public was losing interest in the solemnities of grand-manner painting, preferring genre or landscape. Moreover, there was a dearth of state patronage for the grand genre during the Second Empire. It was in this unpromising climate that, inspired by the murals of Théodore Chassériau at the Cour des Comptes, in the Palais d’Orsay, in the 1850s Moreau formulated the ambition to ‘créer un art épique qui ne soit pas un art d’école’,6 in other words, to create a non-academic form of history painting. This he achieved in the 1860s, after an intensive study tour in Italy, by rejecting both naturalism and the academic, theatrical paradigm in favour of a static, symbolic and enigmatic treatment of mythological subjects painted in a style inspired partly by Italian early Renaissance masters. Moreau thereby earned for himself a reputation as a ‘posthumous pupil of Mantegna’, but also as a potential saviour of serious history painting.7 Although far from uncontested, his successes at the Salon, beginning with Œdipus and the sphinx (Fig.36) in 1864,
enabled him to pursue an honourable official career, complete with Salon medals, the Légion d’honneur and his election in 1888 to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, followed in 1892 by his appointment as professeur chef d’atelier at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In the 1870s, faced with a new generation of history painters, and notably by the striking successes of Henri Regnault and Jean-Paul Laurens, Moreau widened his iconography to include biblical subjects and
1 For recent examples, see R. Rapetti: Le Symbolisme, Paris 2005, pp.40–46; and G. Lacambre: exh. cat. Il Simbolismo da Moreau a Gauguin a Klimt, Ferrara (Palazzo dei Diamanti) and Rome (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) 2007; reviewed in this Magazine, 149 (2007), pp.581–82. 2 Moreau features significantly in such major studies of Decadence as J. Pierrot: L’Imaginaire décadent, Paris 1977; B. Dijkstra: Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, Oxford 1986; and E. Stead: Le Monstre, le singe et le fœtus: tératogénie et Décadence dans l’Europe fin-de-siècle, Geneva 2004. 3 See G. Lacambre: ‘Gustave Moreau peintre d’histoire’, in idem: exh. cat. Gustave Moreau et l’antique, Millau (Musée de Millau et des Grands Causses) 2001, pp.41–57; P. Cooke: ‘Gustave Moreau’s “Salome”: the Poetics and Politics of History Painting’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 149 (2007), pp.528–36; idem: ‘Gustave Moreau and the
Reinvention of History Painting’, Art Bulletin 90 (2008), pp.394–416; C. Scassellati Cooke: ‘The Ideal of History Painting: Georges Rouault and other students of Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1892–98’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 147 (2006), pp.332–39; and S.C. Allan: ‘Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) and the Afterlife of French History Painting’ (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Princeton, 2007). 4 ‘Le grand art est l’art des hautes conceptions poétiques et imaginatives – art improprement appelé pour la peinture “Peinture d’Histoire” –, ce qui est un non-sens, car le grand art ne prend pas ses éléments, ses moyens d’action dans l’histoire. Il les prend dans la poésie pure, dans la haute fantaisie imaginative, et non dans les faits historiques, à moins de les allégoriser “symboliser”’; P. Cooke: Ecrits sur l’art par Gustave Moreau, Fontfroide 2002, II, p.349. 5 On the state of history painting in mid-nineteenth-century France, see for example H. Loyrette: ‘History Painting’, in H. Loyrette and G. Tinterow: exh. cat.
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36. Œdipus and the sphinx, by Gustave Moreau. 1864. Canvas, 206.4 by 104.8 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
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38. Galatea, by Gustave Moreau. 1880. Panel, 85.5 by 66 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). 37. Salome, by Gustave Moreau. 1876. Panel, 144 by 103.5 cm. (UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles).
renewed his style, dramatically developing his talents as an idiosyncratic colourist and a virtuoso manipulator of surface effects. The results, such as Salome, shown in the Salon of 1876 (Fig.37), and Galatea, Salon of 1880 (Fig.38), confirmed Moreau’s status as one of the most innovative and interesting history painters of his time.8 Even Joris-Karl Huysmans, in his review of the Salon of 1880, recognised that Moreau was devoted to the grand genre, claiming that he stood ‘head and shoulders above the banal mob of history painters’. But in the same article he began to construct a mythical image of Moreau as ‘a mystic locked away, in the middle of Paris, in a cell which the noise of contemporary life no longer penetrates’.9 For Huysmans, Moreau was the exact opposite of the naturalist or Impressionist artist, the painter of modern life whom on the one hand he had celebrated in Edgar
Degas and, on the other, had explored in his novel Les Sœurs Vatard (1879) through his seedy character Cyprien Tibaille, and he made of Moreau a figure almost as fictional. It was in A rebours (1884), of course, that Huysmans gave his vision of Moreau full rein, making the painter of Salome into ‘a pagan mystic’ who saw ‘the cruel visions, the magical apotheoses of other ages’, a man of ‘entirely modern nervousness’, ‘haunted by the symbols of perversity and superhuman desire, of divine debauchery consummated without abandon and without love’.10 Through virtuoso, fantastical descriptions of Salome and The apparition (Fig.39) incorporated into the collection of the reclusive aesthete Jean de Floressas des Esseintes, Huysmans made their author into a high priest officiating in a perverse cult of the femme fatale. If des Esseintes chose to hang Salome and The apparition on the walls of his study rather than Galatea or Helen (present whereabouts unknown), for example, it is because the former held particular attractions. It is true that Huysmans
The Origins of Impressionism, Paris (Grand Palais) and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1994–95, pp.29–53; P. Mainardi: ‘The Death of History Painting in France, 1867’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 100 (1982), pp.219–26; P. Cooke: Gustave Moreau et les arts jumeaux. Peinture et littérature au dix-neuvième siècle, Bern 2003, pp.52–56; and Allan, op. cit. (note 3), ‘Introduction’. On the mid-nineteenth-century loss of confidence in the ability to emulate the old masters in the genre of grand-manner painting, see M.J. Gottlieb: The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting, Princeton 1996, ch.2. 6 See A. Brisson: ‘L’Ami du peintre’, Le Temps (2nd December 1899). 7 T. Gautier: ‘Salon de 1864’, Le Moniteur universel (27th May 1864). On Moreau’s archaism, see P. Cooke: ‘Gustave Moreau’s “Œdipus and the Sphinx”: Archaism, Temptation and the Nude at the Salon of 1864’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 146
(2004), pp.609–15. On Moreau’s favourable critical reception, see Cooke, op. cit. (note 5), pp.55–56. 8 For analyses of these paintings, see Cooke 2007, op. cit. (note 3); and G. Lacambre: ‘Une nouvelle acquisition du musée d’Orsay: la Galatée, 1880, de Gustave Moreau’, Revue du Louvre. La revue des musées de France 4 (1998), pp.73–80. 9 J.K. Huysmans: ‘Le Salon officiel de 1880’, L’Art moderne (1883), Paris 1902 (2nd ed.), pp.152 and 155. On the Huysmans–Moreau relationship, see M. Eigeldinger: ‘Huysmans interprète de Gustave Moreau’, in A. Guyaux, C. Heck and R. Kopp, eds.: Huysmans, une esthétique de la décadence, Paris 1987, pp.203–12; and A. Guyaux, M.-C. Forest et al.: exh. cat. Huysmans–Moreau. Féeriques visions, Paris (Musée Gustave Moreau) 2007–08. 10 J.K. Huysmans: A rebours, ed. D. Grojnowski, Paris 2004, p.95. the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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39. The apparition, by Gustave Moreau. 1876. Watercolour on paper, 106 by 72.2 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
conceived of Helen also as a femme fatale, ‘like an evil divinity who poisons, without even being aware of it, everything that draws near her and everything that she looks at or touches’,11 but the figure of Salome offered Huysmans the advantage of satisfying both his misogyny and his anti-Semitism.12 And so it was the daughter of Herodias who became, for fin-de-siècle culture, ‘the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among all others’,13 in other words, the archetypal femme fatale. Moreover, the two versions of the subject that Moreau exhibited at the Salon of 1876 and the Exposition universelle of 1878 are among the most theatrical in his œuvre, thanks to the dancer’s emphatic (but enigmatic) gesture and the extravagant and suggestive architectural decor. This theatricality encouraged and justified the hallucinatory mise-en-scène in the novel. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the two works allowed the novelist to develop a narrative sequence, with the fateful dance leading to the apparition, or vision, of the saint’s bloody head. The fictional context and the particular point of view of the neurotic aesthete des Esseintes justify stylistic excesses and 11
Idem, op. cit. (note 9), p.154. See D. Grojnowski: ‘Salomé, l’art et l’argent’, in P. Brunel and A. Guyaux, eds.: Huysmans, Paris 1985, pp.165–72. 13 Huysmans, op. cit. (note 10), p.92. 14 Ibid., pp.59 and 60. 15 Ibid., p.89. 16 Ibid., p.91. 17 Huysmans possessed a Goupil photo-engraving of Salome and an etching by Eugène Gaujean of The apparition. 18 See D. Grojnowski, in M. Dottin and D. Grojnowski: ‘Lectures des “Salomé” de Gustave Moreau: parole “collective” et parole “personnelle”’, in A. Mansau and G. Ponnau, eds.: Transpositions. (Travaux de l’université Toulouse-le-Mirail, A, 38), Toulouse 1986, pp.43–51. 19 ‘Un fumeur d’opium qui aurait à son service des mains d’orfèvre pour sertir et monter ses rêves, donnerait l’idée de cet artiste unique dans notre école’; P. de Saint-Victor: ‘Salon de 1876’, La Liberté (19th May 1876). The association of Moreau with opium dreams 12
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extravagant interpretations that would not have been acceptable in Salon criticism. The disenchanted protagonist of the novel shuts himself away in a hermetically sealed retreat in order to enjoy ‘chimerical delights’: he is one of those who can ‘withdraw sufficiently to induce hallucinations’.14 It is to favour this dangerous psychological exercise that he introduced into his house ‘a few suggestive works of art that cast him into an unknown world, [. . .] shaking his nervous system with erudite attacks of hysteria, with complicated nightmares, with nonchalant and atrocious visions’.15 The purpose of these pictures was to reawaken the senses of this tired debauchee who contemplates, as a connoisseur–voyeur, ‘the active depravities of the dancer’ who remains ‘accessible only to disturbed, sharpened brains, as if made visionary by neurosis’.16 Embedded in the fictional web of the novel and activated by a hallucinatory ekphrasis, the two works by Moreau are the pretext for an erotic theatre mirroring the sexual obsessions of the protagonist. Huysmans is known to have studied Salome and The apparition through black-and-white reproductions, and one wonders whether this mediation was not necessary in order to diminish the plastic intensity of the referents, allowing the writer to integrate the pictures fully into his fiction.17 Be that as it may, Huysmans succeeded so well in incorporating the two works of art into his novel that to this day they have remained the prisoners of Decadent literature. Huysmans’s conception of Moreau as a perverse, visionary artist was not entirely new: Salon critics had already been struck by the strangeness of Salome and The apparition, which they found ‘bizarre’, ‘enigmatic’ and ‘fantasmagorical’.18 In the wake of Paul de Saint-Victor, they had often described their author as an opium-smoker and a visionary.19 But A rebours crystallised the myth of Moreau into a prestigious and durable form that penetrated the fin-de-siècle imagination: after 1884 it was no longer possible to see him simply as an innovative or eccentric history painter. It is thanks to Huysmans that decades later the poet Albert Samain described Moreau as ‘sumptuous, golden and decadent’ or that in 1989 Pierre Cabanne presented him as ‘a painter who accommodated vice with the aim of both enchanting and frightening the spectator’.20 The mythical fin-de-siècle vision was greatly aided by Moreau’s withdrawal from public exhibitions, with the exceptions of his participation in a collective exhibition of watercolours illustrating La Fontaine’s Fables in 1881, a one-man exhibition of the same at the galerie Goupil in 1886 and two works re-exhibited at the Centennale de l’art français in 1889. Salome and The apparition disappeared into private collections and became known above all through the distorting mirror of A rebours, while their author became ‘obscurely famous’,21 metamorphosed by the power of Huysmans’s prose from the Salon became one of the topoi of Salon criticism. Gaston Schéfer, for example, describes Helen and Galatea as follows: ‘Ce sont deux visions qui s’impriment dans le cerveau avec cette force particulière aux creations du rêve. Ces deux figures, évoquées par un nécromant, s’imposent à l’imagination, comme ces apparitions éblouissantes, d’une beauté et d’un éclat fantastiques, qu’enfante le sommeil du hashisch ou de l’opium’; see G. Schéfer et al.: L’Exposition des Beaux-Arts (Salon de 1880), Paris 1880. 20 A. Samain: ‘L’Evolution de la poésie lyrique au XIXe siècle’, in Carnets intimes, Paris 1939 (2nd ed.), p.238; and P. Cabanne: L’Art du XIXe siècle, Paris 1989, p.182. 21 A. Renan: ‘Gustave Moreau’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ser., 21 (1899), p.6. 22 On the important role played by reproduction in disseminating Moreau’s works, see G. Lacambre: ‘La Diffusion de l’œuvre de Gustave Moreau par la reproduction au XIXe siècle’, Bulletin de la Sociéte J.-K. Huysmans 94 (2001), pp.30–51. On ekphrastic sonnets inspired by Moreau’s Galatea and Helen, see P. Cooke: ‘Critique d’art et transposition d’art: autour de “Galatée” et d’“Hélène” de Gustave Moreau’, Romantisme 118/4 (2002), pp.37–53; and idem, op. cit. (note 5), pp.148–61. On the Moreau–Montesquiou relationship, see A. Bertrand: Les Curiosités esthétiques de Robert
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painter celebrated in the 1860s and 1870s by serious critics such as Maxime Du Camp, Ernest Chesneau and Paul de Saint-Victor into the legendary hermit of the rue de la Rouchefoucauld. Thanks to A rebours, Moreau attracted the sustained attention of a young generation of Symbolist and Decadent writers, including, in particular, Robert de Montesquiou, Francis Poictevin and Jean Lorrain, all of whom wrote the painter admiring letters, sent him autographed copies of their books and transposed his works, known mostly through reproductions, in the form of precious sonnets or poetic prose.22 Of all these writers, Jean Lorrain is the one who took the Decadent vision furthest, claiming that Moreau had ‘forced the door to Mystery’ and had ‘troubled his whole age, [giving] a whole generation of artists, sick today with the beyond and with mysticism, the dangerous love of delicious dead women, the dead women of yesteryear, resuscitated by him in the mirror of Time’.23 The influence of Huysmans is evident in Lorrain’s description of Moreau’s art as ‘this painful obsession with the symbols and perversities of the old theogonies, this curiosity about divine debaucheries in dead religions’, which, he claimed, had become ‘the exquisite sickness of the délicats of this fin de siècle’.24 After Moreau’s death, no longer constrained by his respectful friendship with the painter, Lorrain developed his obsessive vision of the latter further in a chapter of his perverse, hyper-Decadent novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901). Building patently on A rebours, which Monsieur de Phocas surpasses in sickly extravagance, Lorrain make his deranged protagonist obsessed with some of the paintings in the newly created Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, describing Moreau as ‘the poet of charnel pits, battlefields and sphinxes’, a man ‘haunted by the symbolic cruelty of deceased religions and the divine debaucheries once adored by the peoples’.25 Naturally, for Lorrain, Moreau was the painter of ‘Salome, Helen, the Ennoia fatal to races, the Sirens disastrous to humanity’, in other words, the painter of the femme fatale.26 The Decadent vision of Moreau as a perverse ‘hothouse’ painter, obsessed with the figure of the femme fatale, is still alive today, and his Salome and The apparition are rarely mentioned without citing A rebours. Although clearly flattered, on one level, by the literary homage that he received from a younger generation,27 Moreau can only have been disturbed to read some of the Decadent interpretations of his work. Indeed, although he had a cordial relationship with Lorrain and although he eventually wrote to Huysmans, warmly thanking him for his ‘sympathie d’artiste’ and praising his ‘marvellous and incomparable tool’ (i.e. his pen),28 he can hardly have been pleased to read in Certains (1889) that all his watercolours gave the writer the impression of ‘spiritual onanism, repeated, in chaste flesh’.29 In 1894 he confided in his pupil Henri Evenepoel
that writers sent him flatteringly autographed works in which they attributed to him ‘a load of feelings that I don’t have, and ideas that I hope I never shall have’.30 In Moreau’s eyes, everything in his art was ‘high, powerful, moral, beneficial and educational’, in keeping with the traditional ideals of history painting.31 Moreau was not alone in his misgivings about the literary publicity that his œuvre received; some art critics also protested against ‘the sometimes compromising admiration’ of ‘the young school of writers’ and ‘an adventitious literature that has commented on [Salome and The apparition] in the wrong way [A rebours]’.32 However, if writers found in Moreau’s works ‘a mine of literature’,33 and if they saw in them perverse and ‘troubling’ aspects that were at variance with Moreau’s idealist ideology, it is because, despite the artist’s vehement denunciation of ‘excitation testiculaire’ in art,34 they do indeed contain a suppressed erotic and emotive charge, a charge that has not lost its power to
de Montesquiou, Geneva 1996, I, pp.305–29. 23 J. Lorrain: Sensations et souvenirs, Paris 1895, p.65. On the relationship between Lorrain and Moreau, see idem and G. Moreau: Correspondance et poèmes, ed. T. Rapetti, Paris 1998. 24 Lorrain 1895, op. cit. (note 23), pp.66–67. 25 For the influence of A rebours on Monsieur de Phocas, see J. de Palacio: ‘La Postérité d’“A rebours” ou le livre dans le livre’, in Figures et formes de la décadence, Paris 1994, p.195. 26 J. Lorrain: Monsieur de Phocas, Paris 1992, p.212. On this novel and the role assigned in it to Gustave Moreau, see especially J. Birkett: The Sins of the Fathers. Decadence in France 1870–1914, London and New York 1986, pp.201–07; and J. Dalançon: ‘Moreau contre Moro: la monstruosité picturale dans “Monsieur de Phocas” de Jean Lorrain’, La Licorne 35 (1995), pp.113–24. 27 The correspondence in the archives of the Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, testifies to cordial relations with some writers of the younger generation, especially Robert de Montesquiou, Francis Poictevin and Jean Lorrain. Moreau went to the expense of
having all the autographed copies of books sent to him by admiring authors bound. 28 Letter of 4th October 1891, see Guyaux and Forest, et al., op. cit. (note 9), p.70. Moreau met Huysmans for the first time, in the company of Jean Lorrain, on 4th June 1885. 29 J.-K. Huysmans: Certains, Paris 1894 (2nd ed.), p.19. 30 ‘Il y a des écrivains qui m’envoient régulièrement leurs œuvres avec des dédicaces flatteuses et me prêtent, en parlant de moi, un tas de sentiments que je n’ai pas, et des idées, que j’espère ne jamais avoir’; remark by Moreau quoted by Henri Evenepoel, letter of 10th March 1894, in H. Evenepoel: Lettres à mon père, 1892–1899, ed. D. Derrey-Capon, Brussels 1994, I, p.294. 31 Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), I, p.169. 32 P. Leprieur: ‘Gustave Moreau’, L’Artiste (March 1889), p.163; and Renan, op. cit. (note 21), p.58. 33 A. Symonds: ‘Gustave Moreau’, Studies in Seven Arts, London 1906, p.73. 34 ‘Pas de communion possible [. . .] entre votre hystérie, votre excitation testiculaire et l’allégresse divine, l’enthousiasme sacré que procurent les choses de l’art et qui les créent’; Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), II, p.240.
40. Orpheus, by Gustave Moreau. 1865. Panel, 154 by 23.5 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
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41. Orpheus, by PierreAmédée MarcelBeronneau. 1897. Canvas, 195 by 154 cm. (Musée des BeauxArts, Marseille).
42. Salome, by Franz von Stuck. 1906. Canvas, 114.5 by 92 cm. (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich).
fascinate.35 Thus, if Œdipus and the sphinx is a moral allegory, a kind of pagan temptation of St Anthony, it also offers a voluptuous representation of the female body as seductive monster.36 If Orpheus (Fig.40) is a pagan pietà celebrating the survival of poetry and art beyond the death of the poet–martyr, it also presents a highly ambiguous female figure whose demure head is contradicted by the discreet sensuality of her bare feet. Her relationship with the severed head at which she gazes remains enigmatic and disturbing. If Galatea is a celebration of beauty in which the idealised female body is displayed like a jewel surrounded by jewels, it is also a meditation on the theme of lust, strikingly represented by the staring eye of the tormented Cyclops. Worryingly, the spectator, to whom Galatea offers a full view of her resplendent nudity, is placed in the position of the voyeur Cyclops. It is this mythologically masked eroticism that led twentieth-century writers to see in Moreau’s œuvre evidence of ‘sexual obsession’ and ‘a suppressed libido frustrated of its natural object’.37 If Moreau is, as has recently been claimed, an ‘unwilling Decadent’, it is because elements of his iconography lend themselves to such an interpretation.38 Above all, Moreau’s cult of artifice, his misogyny and his ambivalent attitude of mingled horror and attraction towards nature and the flesh have much in common with the Decadent mentality. His Neo-Platonic idealism, on the other hand, is closer to Symbolist ideology.
Although, already in the 1890s, some critics recognised in Moreau ‘the artist predestined to serve as a link between the Romantic school and the new Symbolism’,39 it was not until well into the twentieth century that he became firmly associated with this movement. He occupies a very modest place, with three pictures and a short text, in the first exhibition of Symbolist art and literature, held in 1936.40 In 1947 Charles Chassé devoted a less than enthusiastic chapter to him in his pioneering book Le Mouvement symboliste dans l’art du XIXe siècle. It is not until Philippe Jullian’s book Esthètes et magiciens (Paris 1969) that Moreau was accorded a truly important, and enthusiastic, place in Symbolist art. Thereafter, and especially since the major exhibition French Symbolist Painters, held at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1972, Moreau has been a significant presence in all major exhibitions and monographs devoted to Symbolist art.41 But to evaluate this association is not a straightforward matter, largely because Symbolist art is itself a problematic concept.42 Indeed, such a wide variety of artists have been gathered together under the aegis of Symbolism that it is not always easy to see what they have in common. However, if Symbolist art does not constitute a truly coherent movement, the term is nonetheless useful for denoting certain important iconographical and aesthetic tendencies that are in opposition to naturalism, PostImpressionism and academicism, tendencies that privilege the
35 On the tensions between spiritual aspirations and sensuality in Moreau, see idem: ‘“Les Lyres mortes” (1896–1898) de Gustave Moreau, vie et mort de la mythologie païenne’, Revue du Louvre. La revue des musées de France 3 (2008), pp.86–99. 36 For the iconography of temptation in Œdipus and the sphinx, see Cooke, op. cit. (note 7). 37 G. Bataille: Les Larmes d’Eros, in Œuvres complètes, ed. D. Hollier, Paris 1978, X, p.622; and P. Hahlbrock: Gustave Moreau oder das Unbehagen in der Natur, Berlin 1976, p.138. More recently, Bernard Noël has seen in Moreau’s Jason (1865; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), ‘an extreme and, as it were, violently veiled sensuality’; B. Noël: Les Peintres du désir, Paris 1992, p.79. 38 M. Cullinane: ‘Guilt by Association: Gustave Moreau, the Unwilling Decadent’, Art Criticism 17/1 (2001), pp.55–72. Similarly, Natasha Grigorian has claimed that ‘Huysmans employs a slanted, decadent interpretation of the painter, whose work is largely dominated by a more luminous ideal’; N. Grigorian: ‘The Writings of J.-K. Huysmans and Gustave Moreau’s Painting: Affinity or Divergence?’, Nineteenth-
Century French Studies 32, nos.3 and 4 (2004), pp.282–97, esp. p.282. 39 R. Marx: ‘La Peinture et la sculpture aux Salons de 1895’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ser., 14 (1895), p.31. Likewise, Albert Aurier included Moreau among those artists who were ‘Symbolists, not, I think, without knowing it, but without telling us’; A. Aurier: ‘Les Peintres symbolistes’, in Textes critiques 1889–1892. De l’impressionnisme au symbolisme, Paris 1995, p.98. 40 E. Jaloux et al.: exh. cat. Cinquantaire du symbolisme, Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France) 1936. 41 P. Jullian, A. Bowness and G. Lacambre: exh. cat. French Symbolist Painters: Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon and their Followers, London (Hayward Gallery) and Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery) 1972. This was followed shortly afterwards by G. Lacambre’s exhibition Le Symbolisme en Europe, Rotterdam (Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen), Brussels (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique), Baden-Baden (Staatliche Kunsthalle) and Paris (Grand Palais) 1975. 42 On the problematic nature of Symbolist art, see for example S. Hirst: ‘Editor’s
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43. Orpheus at Eurydice’s tomb, by Gustave Moreau. c.1890–91. Canvas, 173 by 128 cm. (Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris).
transforming power of the imagination and the symbolic expression of the inner world of thought and feeling. Moreau’s association with Symbolism, defined in these terms, is entirely justified. Indeed, Moreau’s credentials as an anti-positivist idealist are impeccable: in a famous note, he went so far as to write:
44. The voices of evening, by Gustave Moreau. 1890s. Watercolour on paper, 34.5 by 32 cm. (Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris).
One of the most important and consistent elements in Moreau’s aesthetic thought is a determined rejection of naturalism. The roots of this are to be found on the one hand in academic idealism, in the beau idéal of the Neo-classical tradition, and on the other in Pre-Raphaelitism, with its nostalgia for the spiritual purity of an authentic Christian art, which theorists such as Alexis-Francis Rio and Félicité de Lamennais opposed to the ‘pagan’ naturalism of the High Renaissance and its legacy.44 Out of academic idealism and Pre-Raphaelite archaism Moreau forged an anti-naturalist style founded on the enigmatic and allegorical interpretation of mythological subjects and the anti-theatrical ‘contemplative immobility of the human body’.45 For Moreau, clearly influenced by the ideas propagated by Romantic thinkers such as Friedrich Creuzer and J.D. Guigniaut, ancient myths enabled the artist to transcend history and attain a timeless poetic world pregnant with mysterious, symbolic meaning.46 Moreau
once even went so far as to define painting as ‘this language of symbol, myth and sign’.47 This felicitous formula is one of a number of proto-Symbolist statements which make of Moreau a major precursor of Symbolist aesthetics, although, inexplicably, none of his writings feature in Henri Dorra’s anthology of Symbolist Art Theories.48 Thus, for example, Moreau declares the artist’s need to protect his thought with ‘a mysterious envelope which keeps the spectator at a respectful distance’, a formula reminiscent of Stéphane Mallarmé’s declaration that ‘everything sacred, that wishes to remain sacred, envelops itself in mystery’.49 In another note Moreau boasts of ‘this indeterminate and mysterious character’ with which he endowed his art.50 Equally significant is his better-known statement: ‘the evocation of thought by lines, arabesques and plastic means, that is my goal’.51 If this affirmation of the specific eloquence of painting, written in the 1860s, belongs to a tradition that can be traced back to Roger de Piles, it also prefigures the theory of the Nabis, as expressed by Maurice Denis in his ‘Préface de la IXe Exposition des peintres impressionnistes et symbolistes’, according to which the Symbolist painters privileged expression through ‘this aesthetic assemblage of forms and colours’, believing that ‘to every emotion, every human thought, there exists a plastic, decorative equivalent, a corresponding beauty’.52 Happily for the Symbolists, Moreau’s aesthetic found one of its most perfect expressions in Orpheus, exhibited at the Salon of 1866 and the Exposition universelle of 1867 and purchased by
Statement: Symbolist Art and Literature’, Art Journal 45/2 (1985), pp.95–97; and D. Gamboni: ‘Le “symbolisme en peinture” et la littérature’, Revue de l’art 96 (1992), pp.13–23. Two main approaches to the classification of artists as ‘Symbolist’ have been identified, iconographical and formal. Rapetti, op. cit. (note 1), has skilfully blended the two. 43 ‘Je ne crois ni à ce que je touche, ni à ce que je vois. Je ne crois qu’à ce que je ne vois pas et uniquement à ce que je sens. Mon cerveau, ma raison me semblent éphémères et d’une réalité douteuse; mon sentiment intérieur seul me paraît éternel, incontestablement certain’; Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), I, p.163. 44 A.-F. Rio: De la poésie chrétienne dans son principe, dans sa matière et dans ses formes, Paris 1836; and F. de Lamennais: De l’art et du beau, Paris 1872. On the ‘hieratic style’, see M.P. Driskel: Representing Belief. Art and Society in Nineteenth-Century France, Philadelphia 1992, ch.2. 45 Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), I, p.54. On Moreau’s ‘contemplative immobility’, see
idem, op. cit. (note 5), pp.104–10. 46 Creuzer’s highly influential study Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker (1810–12) was translated, reworked and expanded by J.D. Guigniaut as Religions de l’Antiquité considérées principalement dans leurs formes symboliques et mythologiques, Paris 1825–51. 47 Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), II, p.258. 48 H. Dorra: Symbolist Art Theories, Berkeley and London 1994. 49 Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), I, p.121; S. Mallarmé: ‘Hérésies artistiques. L’Art pour tous’ (1862), Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Mondor, Paris 1945, p.257. 50 Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), II, p.259. 51 Ibid., I, p.57. 52 M. Denis: Le Ciel et l’Arcadie, ed. J.-P. Bouillon, Paris 1993, p.28. This does not mean that the Nabis were influenced by Moreau, whom Denis considered to be ‘à certains égards, à l’antipode de nos idées’; ‘L’Epoque du symbolisme’ (1934), ibid., p.213.
I believe neither in what I touch, nor in what I see. I believe only in what I do not see and solely in what I feel. My brain and my reason seem ephemeral and of doubtful reality to me; my inner feeling alone seems eternal, undeniably certain to me.43
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the State for the Musée du Luxembourg, where, until Moreau’s death in 1898, it was the only one of his works to hang in a public collection in Paris. In its haunting, melancholic atmosphere and its enigmatic strangeness, Orpheus exemplifies what Moreau proudly called ‘this indeterminate and mysterious character’. Its impact on Symbolist art was profound. While writers undertook ‘pilgrimages’ to the Luxembourg to contemplate the troubling image of the Thracian girl gazing at the poet’s lifeless head,53 painters adopted the morbid iconography of the closed eyes and the severed head, perfect emblems of an other-worldly ‘poetic’ art of subdued emotion and suggestive, polysemous signification. By transforming history painting, stripping it of its academic theatricality, its narrative and didactic legibility, and its naturalistic forms in favour of a suggestive, contemplative style designed to elicit deep thought, reverie and profound but tranquil emotion in the viewer, Moreau helped to pave the way for the creation of a non-academic form of ‘poetic’ idealism in European painting. Moreau’s taste for precious, ornamental detail also foreshadowed the Symbolist interest in the decorative. If Moreau’s suggestive aesthetic prefigured Symbolism, his impact on Symbolist iconography is also significant. It is largely thanks to the prestige of his Salon paintings, disseminated through reproductions, and in the case of Salome and The apparition through the descriptions in A rebours, that Symbolist art abounds with images of seductive sphinxes, perverse Salomes and the severed heads of Orpheus and John the Baptist. Moreau also influenced his pupils at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, who sometimes exhibited morbid, almost parodic pastiches of their teacher’s style at the ‘sâr’ Péladan’s Salons de la Rose-Croix, as can be seen for example in Pierre-Amédée Marcel-Beronneau’s ghastly Orpheus of 1897 (Fig.41).54 In some respects, the Symbolist painters surpassed their master, making explicit, often in a tasteless manner, the erotic undercurrent of Moreau’s art (Fig.42). Moreau undoubtedly influenced Symbolism through his Salon paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, but it is also evident that he in turn imbibed the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle visual culture in the 1890s, despite his lack of contact with artists of a younger generation (apart from his own pupils) and despite his contempt for what he saw as the posturing that lay behind the contemporary taste for mystery, mysticism and Symbolism.55 In the last decade of his life, freed from the constraints imposed by painting for the Salon, Moreau was able to pursue the Symbolist aspects of his work more fully, detaching himself completely from the last vestiges of academicism in such highly expressive and evocative works as the oil painting Orpheus at Eurydice’s tomb (Fig.43),56 painted in commemoration of his beloved Alexandrine Dureux, or the watercolour The voices of evening (Fig.44). In such images, almost entirely bereft of theatricality or narrative, a poetic world emerges, one imbued with a mood of melancholy, expressed 53
See for example J. Laforgue: ‘A propos de toiles ça et là’, Le Symboliste (30th October 1886), p.14, repr. in M. Dottin, ed.: Textes de critique d’art, Lille 1988, p.98; F. Poictevin: ‘Derniers Songes’ (1888), in Derniers Songes suivi de Doubles, Morsangsur-Orge 1991, pp.100–01; and M. Proust: ‘Notes sur le monde mystérieux de Gustave Moreau’, in P. Clarac and Y. Sandre, eds.: Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivis de essais et articles, Paris 1971, pp.667–74. 54 Like other established artists, Moreau refused Joséphin Péladan’s invitations to exhibit at the Salon des Rose-Croix, but encouraged his pupils to do so. For a representative selection of reproductions of works by Moreau’s pupils, see P. Schneider et al.: exh. cat. Gustave Moreau y su legado, Mexico City (Centro cultural de Arte contemporáneo) 1994–95. 55 See Cooke, op. cit. (note 4), II, p.326. 56 For an analysis of this painting, see idem: ‘L’image et le texte. L’“Orphée” (vers 1890–1891) de Gustave Moreau, la peinture et sa “notice”’, Revue du Louvre.
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45. Jupiter and Semele, by Gustave Moreau. 1895. Canvas, 212 by 118 cm. (Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris).
through saturated, non-naturalistic colours and a simplified, suggestive iconography. Here Moreau fully attained his goal of evoking thought (and feeling) by plastic means. In the quasi-religious horror vacui of Jupiter and Semele (Fig.45), on the other hand, a kind of syncretic altarpiece which must be counted among the supreme (and strangest) achievements of Symbolist art, Moreau’s taste for the decorative, the symbolic and the mysterious reached an extreme.57 His lifelong ambition to create a non-academic form of history painting thus culminated in remarkably diverse works of the 1890s, all of which may legitimately be regarded as accomplished expressions of pictorial Symbolism. Ultimately, the three distinct views of Gustave Moreau, as a history painter, a Symbolist and a Decadent, are not incompatible. Each of them contains an aspect of the truth. While recent efforts to situate Moreau’s endeavour in the context of French history painting have provided an essential key to understanding his achievements, there can be no doubt that his œuvre also possesses elements in common with both Symbolism and Decadence. Moreau was an ambiguous, multi-faceted artist and, despite the mythical isolation attributed to him, a man of his time who both influenced and was in turn influenced by the visual culture of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century.58 La revue des musées de France 3 (1995), pp.66–72. 57 On the iconography of Jupiter and Semele, see especially J.D. Kaplan: ‘Gustave Moreau’s “Jupiter et Sémélé”’, Art Quarterly 33/4 (1970), pp.393–414; on its relationship with Symbolism, see P. Cooke: ‘Text and Image, Allegory and Symbol in Gustave Moreau’s “Jupiter et Sémélé”’, in P. McGuinness, ed.: Symbolism, Decadence and Fin de Siècle. French and European Perspectives, Exeter 2000, pp.122–43 and 300–04. 58 Moreau was irritated by the opinion according to which he was ‘an unapproachable and unsociable savage’ and was keen for his correspondence to be conserved as proof of his ‘good relations with friends, intimate acquaintances and others, even mondains’; note of 2nd February 1898; see G. Lacambre: exh. cat. Maison d’artiste, maison-musée. L’exemple de Gustave Moreau, Paris (Musée d’Orsay) 1987, p.50. For a good account of Moreau’s high-society relations, see P. Pinchon: ‘Le “sauvage” et les “mondains” (1856–1906). Les amateurs “fin de siècle” de Gustave Moreau’, Les Cahiers d’histoire de l’art 2 (2004), pp.49–60.
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Obituary Michael Levey (1927–2008) who died aged eighty-one on 28th December last year, was first and foremost a writer. Of course, he was well known for his long association with the National Gallery where, in 1951, he became an Assistant Keeper at the age of twenty-four; in 1986 he retired as its Director after thirteen years of great achievements. Martin Wyld, who worked with him at Trafalgar Square, details below Levey’s legacy, which includes many notable acquisitions, the development of an education department, the establishing of an artist-in-residence programme and the touring of the Gallery’s pictures in museums outside London. All through this period Levey published many wide-ranging books, to much acclaim. But some of his first published writings were for this Magazine, as well as his last review, which appeared posthumously in the January issue this year. While most of Levey’s obituarists gave full accounts of his books and his work at the National Gallery, almost none mentioned his long connection with the Burlington which, as he mentioned in a letter to the present writer last year, had lasted fifty-five years. What follows is an impression of this long connection drawn from personal experience and from the extensive file of correspondence with a succession of five Editors.1 Levey was not a distant contributor; there was much foreplay through letters and telephone calls before a review was finally commissioned from him or an article accepted. Doubts and hesitances had to be talked through and vanquished before the deal was clinched. He did not use a computer and neat scripts appeared from a firm of typists in Lincoln or a secretarial college in Louth, where Levey lived. But woe betide the editorial removal or insertion of a comma or a change in the order of words. ‘I don’t think you or your staff should tinker with somebody’s copy without at least consulting them’, he wrote to one Editor. ‘At least, please don’t do it to me if I am ever to have the privilege of being published again by you.’ Indeed, any editorial alterations were made the more glaring because there were so few. But from the start there were other kinds of skirmish and misunderstanding. There was a sharp if brief exchange with Benedict Nicolson in 1959 over an article offered by John Sparrow on the chapel altarpiece at All Souls, Oxford; Levey had been led to believe that he himself was to have written about the painting and was very considerably ‘upset’. More serious was Levey’s resignation in 1972 as a director of the Burlington after he greatly disapproved of the way in which a new director, Francis Haskell, had been appointed in Levey’s absence from a meeting and without prior discussion with him. It was a question of form and conduct (nothing to do with the new director himself, a friend of Levey’s) that occasioned this breach; he accused Nicolson of a ‘set-up’ and personal relations remained cool throughout the 1970s. Fortunately Levey remained on the Consultative Committee and soon began to write frequently again for the magazine he loved. But a clutch of letters from 1984 show the claws once more emerging from the usual epistolary warmth and politesse. Two slips in an Editorial on the National Gallery were ‘careless, misleading, unjustified and unpleasant’, redolent of the Editor’s ‘fondness for a “crack”’ at the institution Levey directed. But no one was more aware than Levey himself of these exacting traits in his character MICHAEL LEVEY,
(‘I really am very tired of my personality and mean to trade it in for a new one’). Huge branches of olives were effusively received and the correspondence continued – deeply appreciative comments on Oliver Millar and David Wilson; on the beauty of Prague (although on a visit years before ‘I thought we’d never leave the station, as I couldn’t guess the Czech for exit. It sounds rather too apt a symbol of my life . . .’); on his new passion for the novels of Trollope (after reading Phineas Finn he had ‘no idea T. could be so good – at dialogue, at women, at everything – except Phineas, I thought’). His tastes were catholic, dotted with blind spots – G.B. Tiepolo was a god, Watteau and Claude not far behind; but Sebastiano Ricci was ‘no favourite of mine’; for years his ‘excessively Italophile eyes’, as he wrote, were closed to painting in Holland, but his National Gallery colleague, Neil MacLaren, gave him ‘a wonderful Dutch baptism’ and a slow appreciation of Rembrandt developed (which led to the National Gallery’s acquisition of the Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels). Beethoven was out but Mozart very much in (and the subject of his extremely good biography published in 1971). He loved showbiz biographies and memoirs; continued to think Wuthering Heights absurdly overrated; and, rather like George Moore, thought Anne Brontë the best of the trio. He saw merits in obscure eighteenth-century French sculpture not vouchsafed to many other scholars of the period; and with his wife, Brigid Brophy, he shared in the 1960s passion for Aubrey Beardsley. As time went by, Levey became a notable writer of obituaries rather in the manner of Strachey’s Portraits in Miniature. In these, having done his duty by the biographical facts, he would add a pithy and closely observed personal impression – his National Gallery colleague Martin Davies with his string bag of oranges or Cecil Gould whose metaphorical hand was encased in ‘glacé kid’ though warmly lined within. His last contribution of this nature was a full-length portrait of Ellis Waterhouse on the centenary of his birth in 2005. From the other side of the fence, Levey’s many publications can be followed in reviews of them in the Magazine – from Painting in 18th Century Venice (1959) to his last book, a monograph on Sir Thomas Lawrence (2005). His reviewers – including W.G. Constable, Nicolson, Ettlinger and Anita Brookner – all praise his ability to express strong feelings about works of art; the elegance and concision of his style; his grasp of context and reach of reference; his scholarship that never becomes a parade of pedantry; and his ability to be speculative without taking his eye too far away from the immediate subject. They are the kind of books that would be almost impossible to publish today; their urbanity belongs to a different world; and their potential audience (great at the time) has diminished. Levey’s later relations with the Burlington were relatively smooth; indeed his last letters to this office purr with satisfaction. In 1986 he contributed a succinct account of the Magazine’s earliest years to its thousandth issue, beautifully alert to the taste of the Edwardian period and the dying falls of the Aesthetic Movement. For its centenary in 2003 he produced an anthology of writings from the Magazine. This involved his reading every issue and the ferrying by Caroline Elam of batches of bound volumes to the Lincolnshire Wolds. His introduction to this volume is a definitive account of what the Burlington has been about, its strengths and weaknesses, its scholarship presented cogently and 1 For a full account of Michael Levey’s career, see the obituary by Christopher White, Independent (30th December 2008).
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readably (or, as he adds with feline touch, ‘at least jargon-free’). For over half its existence, the Magazine immeasurably benefited from Michael Levey’s devotion to its pages. RICHARD SHONE
IN 196 6 WHEN I joined its Conservation department, the National Gallery had a slender staff, apart from the very distinguished Curatorial department. Philip Hendy was Director, Martin Davies Keeper, and Cecil Gould and Michael Levey Deputy Keepers. Michael was much the most approachable of these imposing figures, and the only one who looked and behaved as if he lived in the swinging sixties. He was also flamboyant (within vegetarian parameters) and part of the literary world as well as something of a television personality. When Hendy retired, Michael became Keeper and I saw much more of him following David Carritt’s discovery that the Tiepolo of An allegory with Venus and Time was set into the ceiling of the Egyptian Embassy in South Audley Street. Michael supervised the Gallery’s young conservators in the removal, restoration and return of the picture, which was soon afterwards acquired at auction. I experienced for the first time his extraordinary kindness and concern for others. Much though we enjoyed Martin Davies’s dry wit and Cecil Gould’s hauteur, it was Michael with whom we discussed the finer points of Carnaby Street fashions, Tiepolo or Patricia Highsmith’s latest Ripley thriller. Michael succeeded Martin Davies as Director in 1973 after the Trustees had fought off an attempt by the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, to appoint John Pope-Hennessy. At that time, the Gallery was known for its scholarship and for having its whole collection on show, but had perhaps slipped behind comparable institutions in what it offered to the public. It was also an introspective institution, partly due to the recent and notorious cleaning controversies. Relations with the press, for instance, were managed by the simple expedient of making sure the Gallery’s spokesman had no idea of what was going on. Then followed a period of modernisation. Michael had an exceptionally good relationship with most of his staff, as well as with the Trustees, who were ably chaired by John Hale. What the Gallery set out to do would now be known as outreach, access and so on, but was then seen simply as establishing a serious Education Department and putting on exhibitions both inside the Gallery and sending shows to regional museums. There was a remarkable change in the Gallery’s attitude to the outside world and its relationship with its visitors. The opening of the northern extension in 1975 provided more space for education and exhibitions. The Artist’s Eye and Painting in Focus series became popular, successful small-scale exhibitions. Directors of the National Gallery are probably remembered more for their acquisitions than for any other achievement. Michael avoided the disappointment of failure for much of his directorship because pictures as expensive as Titian’s Death of Actaeon or Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja rarely came up for sale. Both were offered the year before Michael took over; the former was acquired but the latter was beyond the Gallery’s reach. Many important paintings were acquired in Michael’s first few years, including Velázquez’s Immaculate conception, Parmigianino’s Mystic marriage of St Catherine and Portrait of a man and Rembrandt’s Hendrickje Stoffels. Gaps in the eighteenth-century French school were partly filled by Drouais’s Madame de Pompadour, Perronneau’s Portrait of
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Jacques Cazotte and Fragonard’s Psyche showing her sisters her gifts from Cupid. Michael’s slightly unconvincing aura of decadence was reinforced by significant acquisitions of works by Klimt, Moreau and Redon. He dipped more than a toe into the twentieth century by acquiring Matisse’s Portrait of Greta Moll and Picasso’s Cubist Fruit dish, bottle and guitar of 1914. Michael encouraged creativity among his staff within certain limits. His management was rigorous and detailed, and his grasp of the activities of each member of staff was extraordinary. He was remarkably skilful at making his displeasure known when necessary. After I became Chief Restorer I enjoyed a weekly meeting with the Director. There were also frequent lunches at which it was forbidden to discuss Gallery affairs. Michael claimed to model his management of the Gallery on Liverpool Football Club (he was a supporter because his parents-in-law came from Liverpool) in that anyone who left or retired was replaced immediately by someone of higher quality. The Gallery’s acquisitions of the early 1980s were of an astonishingly high standard. An increase in the purchase grant, the acceptance-in-lieu system, the establishment of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the generosity of the NACF and many other charities led in quick succession to Rubens’s Samson and Delilah, Altdorfer’s Christ taking leave of his mother and great works by Claude, Degas, Hals, Poussin, Van Dyck, Monet, Raphael, Renoir and many others joining the collection. Prolonged negotiations over the export from France of the superb Portrait of Jacobus Blauw by Jacques-Louis David were successfully concluded, to Michael’s delight. Many fine acquisitions were almost taken for granted, for example works by Meléndez, Købke, Wright of Derby, the Master of the St Bartholomew altarpiece and Maarten van Heemskerck. Michael’s last years at the Gallery consolidated his achievements as Director but were also probably his most difficult and eventful. The exhibition of Danish Golden Age paintings was a particular highlight, but this was against a background of reduced Government funding and the handover of the building from the PSA to the Trustees. There was also of course the pressure for a commercial development of the Hampton site for the National Gallery extension; when the Prince of Wales saw the plans he famously described the proposed addition as ‘a monstrous carbuncle’. Despite the debilitating illness of his wife, the writer Brigid Brophy, and Michael’s care for her, his focus never wavered, and bore fruit in two great acts of benefaction. The three Sainsbury brothers, led by John, offered to finance a new wing entirely for the Gallery’s use on the Hampton site, and J. Paul Getty Jr. provided an endowment fund of £50 million. Michael’s directorship ended on a triumphant note. MARTIN WYLD
Letters Lusieri not Hackert S I R , In Alastair Laing’s review in the February 2009 issue (pp.128–29) of the Jakob Philipp Hackert exhibition recently shown in Weimar and Hamburg, he illustrated as Fig.62 a large and much-published watercolour of a View of Rome from the Baths
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of Caracalla (Fig.46), lent from the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, noting that its magical evocation of evening light effects is exceptional in the artist’s œuvre. The reason for this is that it is almost certainly not by Hackert, but by Giovanni Battista Lusieri (c.1751–1821). The case for his authorship was convincingly made in the monograph on Lusieri by Fabrizia Spirito (2003), in which she pointed out the existence of a preparatory pencil drawing for the seated figure at the lower left corner of the Berlin watercolour among the Lusieri material in the Elgin collection at Broomhall (although she too cautiously allowed the possibility that it might be a collaborative work between the two artists). It is in fact entirely characteristic of Lusieri’s Roman views of c.1780, several of which were unknown to Spirito and remain to be published. The authors of the Hackert catalogue appear to have been unaware of the proposed reattribution to Lusieri, for Spirito’s book is not mentioned in the entry on the watercolour, nor in the general bibliography. AIDAN WESTON-LEWIS
available on the internet for some time and was published in a monograph, Urban Larsson Painting 1991–2006 (Zwolle 2006). My book Sight-size Portraiture will be published later this year. NICHOLAS BEER
S I R , While there is ‘no known statement by Picasso nor any archival documentation that he used the sight-size technique . . .’ as I stated in my article, I maintain, contrary to Nicholas Beer’s statement, that there is visual evidence (pointed out in the article) that Picasso was using the sight-size technique. My conclusion came from looking at the original drawing by Picasso, Academic study of a cast of a classical sculpture (1893–94; Musée Picasso, Paris). I would like to point out that my references in the second paragraph of my article were not taken from Nicholas Beer’s essay, as he suggests, but from Gerald Ackerman’s book, Charles Bargue’s Drawing Course (pp.318–22, Appendix 2), which led me to the primary sources such as Roger de Piles, Carolus Duran and Léon Bonnat as cited in my footnotes. For those interested in the sight-size technique there is a great deal of information on many websites of art schools in America and Europe which still teach the technique, including the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence, as well as books such as Ackerman’s. While the sight-size technique was used historically for portraiture, it was also and still is used to teach figure and still-life drawing. I look forward to further illumination on this subject from Nicholas Beer’s forthcoming book.
JOAN P. URANECK
Mondrian and the Vereniging Rembrandt 46. View of Rome from the Baths of Caracalla, here attributed to Giovanni Battista Lusieri. c.1779–80. Watercolour, 49 by 72.8 cm. (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).
Picasso and the sight-size technique SIR , I read with interest the article ‘Picasso’s “Acadmic study of a cast of a classical sculpture” (1893–94) and the sight-size technique’ by Joan Uraneck in your issue of December 2008 (pp.826–28). I would like to point out that copying to scale in the flat does not constitute sight-size; if it did then all such copies would be sight-size, which is patently not the case. Sight-size is primarily a portrait practice, the fundamental principle being that the artist stands back not only to see the sitter and image together but to judge the ‘big effect’ of the work as a whole. There is no evidence (and none is cited in the article) that Picasso ever used or was aware of sight-size as a technique. I should also like to draw attention to the fact that all the references used in the article’s second paragraph are taken from my essay ‘Sight-size, an Historical Overview’, which was presented to Joan Uraneck when she visited Florence last year. It has been
S I R , Although very grateful for Christopher Brown’s genial review of the Vereniging Rembrandt celebrations in your February issue (pp.125–26), I am afraid one point in his text ought to be rectified because the Vereniging would otherwise receive rather more praise than it deserves. The 1931 Lozenge composition with two lines by Mondrian was not bought for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in the year it was painted, nor did the Vereniging have anything to do with its being given to the city of Hilversum at the time. It was a group of friends of contemporary art who bought it for 500 guilders to be placed in the new Hilversum Town Hall, from where the as yet unloved object was then lent to the Stedelijk Museum in 1951. In the course of a conflict with the Dutch government, Hilversum decided to sell the Mondrian in 1987, and it was only in the aftermath of the ensuing row that the city of Amsterdam, the Vereniging Rembrandt, the Algemene Loterij and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds provided the Stedelijk Museum with the 2.5 million guilders needed to retain it. Although the Vereniging supported the third Van Gogh to enter a Dutch public art collection in 1918, it only opened up to further modern and contemporary art in the 1950s, and its board would certainly have had no sympathy with a Mondrian in 1931.
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Books Peintures françaises du XVIIIe siècle. Catalogue raisonné. Musée des BeauxArts de Tours. Château d’Azay-leFerron. By Sophie Join-Lambert. 456 pp. incl. 262 col. + 30 b. & w. ills. (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours and Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2008), €35. ISBN 978–88–366–0998–7. Reviewed by CHRISTOPH MARTIN VOGTHERR T H E M U S E U M I N Tours houses one of the most important groups of eighteenth-century French paintings in France. Several sources contributed to this outstanding collection. A group of significant works seized from the château of Chanteloup in 1794, either formed part of the original decoration of the château commissioned by Jean Bouteroute d’Aubigny or belonged to the duc de Choiseul, who bought the house in 1761, or the duc de Penthièvre, who acquired it in 1786. Twelve morceaux de reception reached Tours in 1806 and in 1951. Other paintings were sent from Paris to Tours in 1803, 1806 and 1820, and a number of judicious acquisitions complemented this extraordinary ensemble. Thus the Museum boasts a large number of important well-documented paintings, as well as works by particularly rare painters of the period such as Jacques Dumont le Romain, Nicolas Fouché, Godefroy de Veaux, Sébastian II Le Clerc and François Marot. The Museum has also benefited from excellent scholarly research. As Boris Lossky’s catalogue of 1962 has long been a major reference work, it was a particularly ambitious plan to recatalogue the eighteenthcentury paintings in Tours, a task taken on by Sophie Join-Lambert. The new catalogue covers the ‘long eighteenth century’, starting with Joseph Parrocel, who was born in 1646, and stretching to works by Louis-Philippe Crépin, who died in 1851. This decision is understandable because neither the seventeenth- nor the nineteenthcentury holdings in Tours are very important, but as a consequence the catalogue now stretches even the most catholic view of the century. 245 paintings are included, among them new acquisitions and works from the reserve collection which had not previously been catalogued. There are important new attributions: a small oil-sketch is convincingly given to Louis Jean-Jacques Durameau, while portraits are newly ascribed to CharlesAntoine Coypel and Perronneau. Although the abundant literature on the works in the collection has been brought up to date, the bibliography shows serious gaps in foreign literature, which provides some essential contributions on specific works. Of great interest is the abundant archival material pertaining to the history of the works in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
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which helps to solve important questions of provenance and sometimes gives fascinating insights into French cultural bureaucracy. The paintings were rephotographed for the amply illustrated catalogue, but the quality of the colour illustrations is uneven, while the poor proof-editing of the book diminishes the pleasure of using it. Many works have recently been restored or cleaned. Reading the short descriptions of the various conservation treatments makes one realise, however, that over the last decades such occasions were rarely used for a closer examination of the works to answer art-historical questions. Close collaboration between curators and conservators is still rare in France, particularly in regional museums, which suffer from both the centralisation of conservation facilities and the unhealthily low status of conservators in French museums in general. We should be grateful for this new catalogue of one of France’s major collections, but it would have benefited from a more rigorous approach. Excessive respect for former scholars through long and often pointless quotation has sometimes stood in the way of new research, while questions of patronage and the political meaning of works are hardly ever addressed. In spite of these limitations, JoinLambert’s catalogue is a book that belongs on the shelf of every true dixhuitièmiste. Some observations on individual works follow: no.4: Apollo and Leucothea, by Antoine Boizot. The influence of Boucher and Carle van Loo is unlikely around 1737. no.19: Mountainous landscape with soldiers, by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Cazin. The transcription of the German inscription cannot be correct. no.25: Mercury confiding the infant Bacchus to the nymphs of Nysa, by Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont. The painting is clearly based on Jean-François de Troy’s painting of 1717 in Berlin. nos.36 and 37: Pygmalion and Galatea and Tobit buries the dead of his tribe in Nineveh. The attribution of the first work to Jean-Baptiste Deshays seems doubtful; of the latter impossible. no.74: Baptism of Christ, by Jean-Jacques Lagrenée le Jeune. The entry describes the style of the painting but does not comment on its obvious proximity to Carle van Loo, Lagrenée’s teacher. no.80: The crowned shepherdess, by Nicolas Lancret. The model for this painting is Boucher’s Gallant shepherd of 1738 in the Hôtel de Soubise, Paris. Lancret is not known to have painted for Frederick II of Prussia. no.100: Mathatias kills a Jewish man and an officer of King Antiochos, by Michel-Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié. Lépicié’s ‘Customs house’ is in Madrid. no.111: The fair at Bezons, by Joseph Parrocel. As Eidelberg points out in M. Eidelberg, ed.: exh. cat. Watteau et la fête galante, Valenciennes (Musée des Beaux-Arts) 2004, p.128, the scene was first (and without sufficient reason) identified with the fair at Bezons in the later part of the last century. nos.119 and 120: The two famous altarpieces by Jean Restout are discussed in Martin Schieder’s Jenseits der Aufklärung, Berlin 1997, pp.180–87. no.154: The sacrifice of Manoah, by Carle van Loo. The oil-sketch has recently been given to the otherwise unknown artist La Mothe; see A.K. Piotrowska in this Magazine, 150 (2008), p.299, but this is disputed in a Letter to the Editor in ibid., p.767.
Liotard. By Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche. 2 vols., 1,280 pp. incl. 448 col. + 460 b. & w. ills. (Davaco, Doornspijk, 2008), €475. ISBN 978–90–70288–08–7. Reviewed by NEIL JEFFARES
‘JUST WHAT LADIES do when they paint for amusement’, sneered Sir Joshua Reynolds about his rival. Mariette noted that JeanEtienne Liotard’s pictures were all the colour of gingerbread; the abbé Le Blanc, describing the Uffizi self-portrait, called Liotard a ‘chienlit’, while the annotations on the list of pictures Liotard tried to sell to the French Crown were scarcely kinder. His ‘caractère atrabilaire et lunatique’ emerged during his training in Paris, where he claimed to have learnt nothing. Nevertheless, Liotard went on to portray members of the Austrian, French and English royal families; it is difficult to think of any other artist who had this opportunity, or discharged it with such originality. Algarotti spotted ‘Holbein in pastel’, and British Grand Tourists and connoisseurs agreed. Today museums that normally shun pastels make an exception for Liotard. His prices are a measure of the anticipation that has awaited this catalogue raisonné. The old Loche and Roethlisberger (L’opera completa di Liotard, Milan 1978) was astonishingly useful, but its tiny reproductions could neither help settle questions of attribution nor completely explain quite how this ‘peintre de la vérité’ achieved his results, or so polarised contemporary opinion. This new work is far more than a new edition, as the sequence of the authors’ names suggests. A combined sixty years’ further experience on the part of the two authors since 1978 has resulted in a comprehensive and magnificent publication: the scale is generous, the production lavish, the scholarship painstaking. Thematic chapters are supported by critical reaction, correspondence and source documents; rejected items and related works by other artists are discussed and reproduced (a particular delight is the rare Guillibaud; fig.523), and there is a full catalogue of the work of Liotard’s brother, Jean-Michel. The heart of the book is the catalogue raisonné. The œuvre (586 numbers) is dominated by pastels (with at least three dozen additions to L & R 1978, although the absence of a concordance obscures the changes), but the catalogue also includes oil paintings, gouaches, ‘transparences’ (Liotard was an inveterate experimenter) and original prints, as well as miniatures and enamels (with contributions here from Bodo Hofstetter and Hans Boeckh). The decision to exclude drawings from the systematic catalogue is regretted, although many have crept in under various guises (the 1992 exhibition catalogue of Liotard’s drawings is available, but some of its attributions were controversial).1 The photographs are mostly excellent – the authors’ favourite Déjeuner Lavergne was hitherto practically invisible in L & R 1978. The descriptive essays are meticulously researched,
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with extensive biographical information on sitters and a selected comparative iconography. Although we are reminded that ‘l’art de Liotard dépasse toujours les limites de l’analyse verbale’, it is impossible to read these essays without responding to the authors’ evident love and appreciation of their subject. The articles also list variants, copies etc., and I suspect these decisions will not meet with universal agreement (the authors are particularly cautious with the early Viennese imperial portraits, many of which they believe were executed by an obscure painter called Kobler). An explicit numbering system for these would have improved the cumbersome cross-referencing, but the authors’ integrity in resisting neat categories is to be applauded. The arguments are expounded with erudition and logic, and are mostly persuasive. The rejected items are dealt with more summarily: this chapter is inevitably selective and largely unillustrated (only fourteen out of the ninety-six numbers, although images of many of the others are not easily available); few alternative attributions are suggested, and these are not always convincing. The chronology of the accepted œuvre is largely supported by external evidence, but when absent, Liotard’s stylistic traits can be confusing. Take no.10 for example: Dassier’s age precludes the previously suggested date of c.1746, but it remains hard to understand how this beautiful pastel could have been done before 1730 when placed against others (e.g. nos.37 and 38). The authors have not drawn on scientific examination of the pastels, a subject that remains under-researched despite the work of Marjorie Shelley, Thea Burns and others. Liotard’s magic is in his distinctive method of obtaining an ultra-smooth finish by firmly compressing the pastel, modifying, but not eliminating, its reflectivity. (It also results in a loss of adhesion which, combined with his use of fugitive pigments such as the carmine lake in no.250, seems to be a greater problem for Liotard’s pastels than for those by his contemporaries.) His best oil painting – the gem in the Louvre (Hélène Galvany et Monsieur Levett; no.64) – simulates the effects of his pastels. In his theoretical writings (reprinted in full for the first time) his physical distaste for ‘touches’ emerges, like Cyrano’s refrain, with repeated emphasis line after line. (One wonders if, despite his image as an autodidact genius, he remained at heart a Genevan enamelist.) But when we compare autograph works such as the two of Lady Tyrells (nos.251 and 252), what distinguishes the better version is often the very ‘touches’ he abhorred. But perhaps Liotard’s art resists microscopy as much as verbal analysis. A number of trivial errors survived proofreading, but more annoying is the inadequate index, which hinders access to the great riches of these volumes. A selection of minor observations follows (by catalogue number): no.1: This reappears on p.238 with additional information. no.8: A pastel version of Massé’s self-portrait has recently come to light, suggesting closer involvement with pastel than was previously thought.
no.14: The arms are those of the Goupil de Prefelne family. no.34: Liotard pastels at Belvoir Castle, Ragley Hall and Roehampton are recorded in Musgrave’s lists, which are not referenced. no.107ff: Fig.203 is again printed in reverse (as are figs.422, 479 and 708). The 8th Fürst von Thurn und Taxis married a great-great-granddaughter of Maria Theresia in 1890. no.120 and passim: The 4 cm. discrepancy vanishes if pouces are converted to cm. at the correct ratio of 2.707 cm. to 1 pouce. no.130: Among eighteenth-century copies are those by Saint-Mémin; Lauer, in turn copied by a certain Herr von Hoffmann, exhibited in Berlin, 1800; and a Frl. Stuten, Berlin, 1787. nos.146 and 147 (p.350): Caroline Luise’s lost pastel may be a copy of La Tour’s portrait of Mlle de La Boissière, probably from the Petit engraving (also copied by Stanisław Leszczy´nski with the face changed to become the marquise de Bassompierre). no.166: A second Windsor pastel (RCIN 401355) is after the Liotard. no.186: A (copy of a) variant appeared in the Montpensier sale, Fernando Durán, Madrid, 6th June 1996, lot 47. nos.190 and 295 (p.397): The Figure turque exhibited at the 1751 Salon de Saint-Luc was ‘toile de 12’ (i.e. 61 by 50 cm.), and so can only be the Wrightsman version (no.295); similarly the lost no.236 cannot be the Vignier Tête de vieillard. no.232: Surely the pastel sold at Fournier, Palais des consuls, Rouen, 3rd March 1976, lot 241 (repr. in N. Jeffares: Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, London 2006, p.594). no.241: It was in fact Mlle Petit who was ‘remerciée pour avoir manqué de respect au directeur’; Louise Jacquet continued to appear at the Opéra until 1758, appearing in Lully’s Acis et Galatée at the time the Liotard was shown. no.303: Probably George, Marquess Townshend, captain of Foot Guards until 1750, a friend of the Marquess of Granby and an amateur artist. His and Sir Everard Fawkener’s sons were sequentially married to Georgiana Ann Poyntz. no.310: Another version is the anonymous pastel also in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no.C1572. no.319: Nicole Ricard is by Lenoir, not La Tour, who only portrayed royal children. no.340: Depicted seven years after Fournier’s portrait, Liotard’s subject is clearly not the ‘grasse volaille hollandaise’ who was tricked by the marquis de Bonnac’s brother, the ‘coq gaullois’ of contemporary reports. no.357: Mme Denis’s letter follows earlier correspondence, previously assumed to refer to Liotard but probably about the Lausanne pastellist De Wyl. Another portrait is referred to in a letter from the elder Cramer to Gravelot (April 1759; Best.7537): ‘Il serait bien nécessaire que mr. Liotard peigne M. de V., tant pour reformer la figure du frontispice, que pour faire graver un beau portrait à la tête de l’édition’. nos.398 and 399: Intermediate pastels by Lion are listed in his accounts; one example in a private collection in Brussels shows the loss of adhesion typical of Liotard’s pastels. no.412: Also engraved by J.G. Haid (1774). no.416: There is only one pastel. It was acquired by Charles, Earl Stanhope, and bequeathed to Lord Grantley in his will (see The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany 79 (1817), pp.187ff). no.428 (p.740): Surely William Chaloner (1745–93) of Guisborough, brother-in-law of General John Hale. Chaloner is documented as in Geneva – by Edward Gibbon. They had dinner ‘chez Lord Mountstuart’ in 1762. Back in London Chaloner quarrelled with Mountstuart over the colourful Mary Eleanor Bowes (Chaloner’s cousin) who,
instead of marrying either man, settled for John Lyon, Earl of Strathmore. no.432: The Cotes pastels were confused in the 2006 sale; lot 182 was in fact of William Keppel, lot 183 of George (after Reynolds), but resemblance and age are still problematic. I suggest that the 1768 pastel is a posthumous portrait of the 2nd Earl, based on Liotard’s own enamel (no.433), perhaps executed in London in 1753/54. A portrait by Romney (Goodwood House, Sussex), supposedly of the 3rd Earl, is derived from the Faber engraving of the 2nd Earl. no.445: Initially bequeathed (will of 22nd February 1778) to the Duchess of Portland, who died before Mrs Delany; it passed to Horace Walpole under a codicil. no.453: Also in Stanhope’s will (see no.416 above), bequeathed to ‘the Secretary of the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’ (Dr Charles Taylor); the RSA has no record. no.530: Chess appears in eighteenth-century pastels from Lundberg to Gardner; Liotard might have been aware of Huber’s Voltaire et Rousseau jouant aux échecs avec Moultou (c.1770; Musée historique, Lausanne). no.531: This seems to have belonged to Camille Groult (sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 21st and 22nd June 1920, lot 21). Attributions for rejections: R8: Cotes; R12: Vispré; R26: Read; R39: Freudenberger; R45: J.P. Bach; R83: Moreau le jeune. R76 is not by La Tour. no.R29: Presumably that sold at Zürich, 29th November 1985; as with others (nos.290, R49, R54, R60 or R68), no alternative to Liotard is convincing; perhaps they relate to lost autograph works. no.R34: Two other pastels attributed to Belle van Zuylen are reproduced in A. Van der Goes and J. de Meyere, eds.: exh. cat. Op stand aan de wand, Maarssen (Slot Zuylen) 1996, pp.114 and 120. 1 See the review by Alastair Laing of A. de Herdt: exh. cat. Dessins de Liotard, Geneva (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire) and Paris (Musée du Louvre) 1992, in this Magazine, 134 (1992), pp.749–51.
Chains. David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France. By Satish Padiyar. 225 pp. incl. 23 col. + 44 b. & w. ills. (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2007), £57.50. ISBN 978–0–271–02963–4. Reviewed by PHILIPPE BORDES THIS STUDY RECONSIDERS Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae, a huge painting on which he worked intermittently between 1799 and 1814. Satish Padiyar’s excitement in front of the picture is patent when he compares the cluster of nudes – ‘the freer, playful luminosity of their shimmering surfaces’ – with David’s earlier paintings (p.141). Yet, like most of David’s great pictures in the Louvre, the painting has faded under a coat of varnish and dirt; the current proximity of a cleaned picture by Jean Broc makes Leonidas appear all the more gloomy. For Padiyar, this grand collage of male academic nudes was not a desperately retardataire project but the progressive expression of Revolutionary ideals retrieved and reactivated against the Terror and against the Empire. He aims to convince us that it should
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be viewed as ‘his great political-erotic work’ (p.46), approaching the picture with the following question in mind: ‘how might the image’s inter-male erotic entanglements operate as the figure through which a postrevolutionary subjectivity is maintained as radical?’ (p.47). The answer follows a commendably inclusive route allowing for close discussion of Anacreon, Kant and Canova. Padiyar is at his best when he engages with the array of revealing studies on the nature of David’s classical ideal that over the last fifteen years have broached issues of gender and subjectivity. To move beyond documentary reiteration when confronting Leonidas, he invokes psychoanalytical theory and speculates that artistic expression was affected by the trauma of the Terror and a resulting collapse of self-confidence among the male population. This interpretative key is taken over from Bronislaw Baczko, Lynn Hunt and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, but with an inflection that raises interesting problems. These authors located their traumatic construction of postrevolutionary subjectivity in the aftermath of the Terror, whereas Padiyar takes it through the Consulate and Empire. This is an original and imaginative book, exemplifying the challenge taken up by many younger art historians in explaining how highly personal motives can play out in forms of artistic expression destined for public consumption. The critical tools mustered to make this complex connection are consciously a kind of bricolage: ‘Chains therefore moves freely, and critically, between queer studies, gay studies, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, each of which thrillingly projects a David who yet belongs to no one of them’ (p.7). The most important scholarly contribution is probably the extended discussion of the difficulties that French translators had over centuries with a descriptive love poem by Anacreon celebrating the body of an adolescent in a state of tumescent excitement. Through a close and penetrating analysis of texts, Padiyar discovers here a way to foreground and historicise sexuality and desire, a welcome move given that gender studies can be surprisingly dry and even puritanical. His chapter on the vogue for anacréontisme around 1800 supersedes all previous interpretations, which have tended to be derogatory, associating the taste with women and commerce. The last chapter astutely unpacks the social and sexual metaphor of the chain that inspires the book’s title: both negatively as an emblem of restraint and positively as an emblem of solidarity. A good part of the book is an attempt to relate David’s Leonidas to the epochal shift from Winckelmann’s ‘ideal beauty’, associated with nostalgia and repression, to the liberating force of Kant’s detached concept of beauty. The further shift in Leonidas to a total inversion of the terms of Winckelmannian aesthetics, in other words to the academic imperative of what might be called the ‘beautiful ideal’, is well suggested in a discussion of Victor Cousin’s aesthetics. One could develop this fascinating argument by bringing
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in Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s discussion on the transformative impact of sculpture on painting during the Empire.1 David’s Leonidas has often been considered an unresolved academic exercise. Padiyar is attentive to the disjunctive relationship of the figures in the composition, which he interprets as ‘the failure of pictorial unity’ (p.39). The tension between David’s betrayal of this central tenet of pre-revolutionary academic doctrine and the indulgently academic nature of a composition based on the male nude is indeed a major source of the picture’s strangeness, yet fully accounted for. It may have been, for example, that David was receptive to Winckelmann’s celebration of the individual figure as the most elevated mode of artistic expression and to the emergence of a detached archaeological sensibility during the Empire, which allowed the radically disjunctive compositions on antique vases to be endowed with a positive appeal. The scope of Padiyar’s remarks would be even broader if the work of more contemporary artists were brought in to test his ideas. Perhaps to compensate for the provocative nature of his arguments, he appears exceedingly reverent toward what he calls ‘classic’ historical studies. His insistence on setting David’s republicanism in opposition to Napoleon rather than to the royalist camp leads him to affirm that when the painter put Leonidas on show in his studio in the autumn of 1814, it was greeted with critical silence, as if the Restoration had created a political vacuum (p.144). There are indications however, that a visit to the studio of Napoleon’s former First Painter at that time was for many a way to signal an opposition to the royalist takeover of the Salon. That readers such as this reviewer might be prompted to debate Padiyar’s arguments in this way should be considered less an indication of their shortcomings than a tribute to their suggestiveness. 1 J. Lichtenstein: La tache aveugle. Essai sur les relations de la peinture et de la sculpture à l’âge moderne, Paris 2003, pp.121–40.
Ingres. By Andrew Carrington Shelton. 240 pp. incl. 160 col. + 20 b. & w. ills. (Phaidon Press, London and New York, 2008), £24.95. ISBN 978–0–7148–4868–6. Reviewed by RICHARD WRIGLEY
erudite, perspicacious and fundamentally passionate monograph on Ingres appeared in 1967 and is a hard act to follow: his book appeared immediately after his brilliant Transformations in Late Eighteenthcentury Art and shared a similar extraordinary depth of scholarship and acuity of visual observation. Since Rosenblum was Andrew Shelton’s dissertation supervisor, circumstances have, alas, ordained that this new publication, also brought out by Phaidon, might be seen as a timely homage. As the
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author of Ingres and his critics (2003) and a participant in the exhibition Portraits by Ingres (2006), Shelton is very well qualified to produce a succinct and accessible monograph on the artist – notably in regard to his work’s critical reception. There is an incontrovertible need for reliable and readable books which one can confidently recommend to students, because they condense key information both biographical and contextual, including even-handed interpretative commentary. This book is probably a little pricey to imagine it becoming a staple of Ingres readership – but it is affordable enough for converts; in paperback, it will be in pole market position. There is no reason why a perfectly serious academic book should not have a cover bound in what seems to be ‘Madame de Senonnes yellow’ pseudo-shot silk, but the present writer’s copy is already showing signs of wear and tear. Shelton’s monograph has a generous range of excellent colour illustrations, including helpful and well-chosen comparative material. The drawings are well represented – even if their muted tonality sometimes refuses to cooperate fully with reproductive technology. The illustrations are mostly large and high quality but I would have much preferred double-page images (e.g. of Grande Odalisque, Roger freeing Angelica, Apotheosis of Homer, Antiochus and Stratonice) to be turned so as to fit on a single page in order to avoid being bisected by the prominent stitching of the central fold. Shelton is an engaging commentator, combining careful description and characterisation with absorbing summaries of often complex biographical and historical material. Ingres is never easy as a subject of explication. As Shelton notes at the outset, while Ingres has too often been lazily pigeonholed as enshrining allegedly quintessential classicist and conservative values, he nevertheless passed through a series of professional and contextual experiences which were entirely typical of those shared by his less celebrated contemporaries. The bizarre ingredients of Ingres’s art, Shelton advises, should not be seen as evidence of his indomitable sensibility, but rather as a manifestation of what he rather opaquely calls the ‘extraordinary power of the post-academic discursive regime under which he was forced to operate’. In other words: ‘The radically fragmented contrasting, even contradictory, work of Ingres seems less a historical aberration than the perfect pictorial expression of the fundamental social, political, and cultural schizophrenia of the age in which he lived’ (p.10). One might say that such ‘radical fragmentation’ is more an expression of current academic proclivities than a useful way of getting to grips with the artist and his art. Fragmentation seems a curious term to apply to paintings and drawings which usually have a quite unshakeable tensile coherence. In the introduction, there seems to be an unhelpful residual adherence to an obsolete academic-versus-modernist polarisation, which is unfortunate, as the substance of the book is grounded in a much less formulaic,
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more particularised account of specific works and phases of Ingres’s work. First, Shelton backdates the creation of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (rather than the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture) to 1648, thus rendering monolithic a long-lived and complex institution. Secondly, the Academy proceeded to exert a ‘near dictatorial authority over artistic production and consumption in France’. On the one hand, dictatorialism smacks of the blurring of the political and artistic vocabularies so habitual in nineteenth-century France; on the other hand, it seems mistaken to imagine that ‘consumption’ could be so comprehensively imposed upon. Admission to the Salon ‘depended on one’s adherence to that institution’s rather strict set of stylistic criteria’ – again, a convenient but unconvincing overstatement. The book proceeds with doubly titled chapters which signal chronological progress and suggest episodes of a moral tale, e.g. ‘Persistence and Frustration. Ingres in Rome (1806–1820)’, ‘Making Ends Meet. Portraits Painted and Drawn (1806–1819)’. The book ends with an epilogue on the artist’s reputation, which is a feature of this Phaidon series. One reason why Shelton is very well qualified to write this book is his extensive familiarity with Ingres’s critical reception. As he has shown at length in his earlier book, and again here with his handling of the numerous translated quotations, this is much more complex and interesting than most art historians of nineteenth-century French art realise, primarily because they rarely make the effort to read the criticism. But the decision not to include notes is scandalous (and this applies in general to Phaidon’s current series of paperback monographs). The bibliographies for each chapter give no details where these critical texts can be found. Whether or not we might feel inclined to trust Shelton (and his translations) is not the point. There is no excuse for excising basic scholarly apparatus, even if this were to be restricted to quotations from primary sources. This requires little space and spells out the precise origins of the quotations to which the author ascribes considerable importance. It is very hard to insist to students that they consistently cite all sources for quotations and key information in their essays and dissertations if a reputed publisher, producing books by respected authors, systematically neglects so to do. The solution in this case is simple: to drop the epilogue on Ingres’s later reputation. Much of the book is already taken up with pondering how Ingres and his viewers, peers and patrons articulated their opinions of his work. And a book that ends by bracketing Ingres and the pictorial platitudes of Kurt Kauper, followed by the vacuous claim: ‘Art, no less than life, is a series of improvised negotiations and endless accommodations, of assumed poses and adopted guises, beneath which no indisputable reality, no core set of fundamental truths or unimpeachable categories – masculinity versus femininity, Orient versus Occident – can be said to exist’ – risks not being taken seriously.
Delacroix et la photographie. Edited by Christophe Leribault, with contributions by Sylvie Aubenas, Françoise Heilbrun, Fiona Le Boucher, Christophe Leribault and Sabine Slanina. 160 pp. incl. 113 col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée du Louvre, Paris/Le Passage Paris-New York Editions, Paris, 2008), €28. ISBN 978–2–35031–219–4 (Musée du Louvre); 978–2–84742–124–8 (Le Passage). Reviewed by JON WHITELEY MANY ARTISTS of his generation, Delacroix approached photography with a mixture of fascination and distrust. He was excited by the possibility of using photographs in place of the prints and studies traditionally used by artists when preparing their compositions but deplored the search for photographic objectivity in the work of some of his contemporaries. Delacroix believed that a work of art, whether based on photographs or painted directly from nature, is a work of the imagination. The true artist recomposes nature, discards the inessential and concentrates on the things that matter. For this reason, Delacroix was most attracted to photographs in which details had been accidentally blurred. The recent memorable exhibition at the Musée Eugène Delacroix in Paris (28th November to 2nd March) explored Delacroix’s attitude to photography and his belief in its practical value as an alternative to life drawing. It also included contemporary photographs of his work and photographic portraits of himself. Each of these subjects is exhaustively discussed in a series of brisk and scholarly essays in the accompanying catalogue along with an essay by Christophe Leribault and Fiona Le Boucher on Delacroix’s collection of photographs after the work of other artists. The catalogue contains illustrations of all the life drawings based on photographs that were in the exhibition, with the addition of eight others: one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, two which have not been located and five from the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne which could not be lent because of the conditions of the bequest. One other drawing of this type, dated 5th October 1854, which appeared at Christie’s in Paris on 27th November 2002, might have been added. Like those dated 6th and 7th October (cat. nos.79 and 81), it was drawn in Dieppe and was probably based on one of Eugène Durieu’s photographs to which it corresponds closely despite an entry in the Journal which suggests that all three were copied from rapid sketches made by ‘Thévelin’ in Durieu’s studio. Who Thévelin was and how he was involved are questions to which there are as yet no good answers. The exhibition drew heavily on the Moreau–Nélaton collection in the Louvre which, like the Musée Bonnat’s collection, cannot be lent to another institution but, by a happy legal twist, the loan was approved because the Musée Delacroix has been annexed to the Louvre since 2004. This allowed the thirty-two photographs of nude models from the Durieu album to be exhibited alongside the corresponding drawings from the
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Louvre, most of which were not copied from the photographs but were drawn in the studio during the photographic sessions. The drawings copied at later dates from the photographs have a more studied character. The exhibition also included three photographs from an album, almost certainly belonging to Delacroix, which have recently been identified as the source for figure studies. Other photographic sources will surely come to light and, when they do, the number of life drawings known to have been based on photographs will also increase. As Pierre Vaisse first pointed out, the contents of the Durieu album are not a homogenous collection but an assemblage made by Delacroix from the photographs which he had commissioned from Durieu in 1854 and from six unrelated photographs. Syvie Aubenas has convincingly refined this observation by dividing the photographs into four groups of which twenty-six belong to the set of calotypes of nudes posed by Delacroix. Unlike the six photographs added to the collection which have an artful character, those commissioned by the artist have a dry, ungraceful appearance recalling the type of pose found in the traditional academic life-class. The exhibition included the charming painting of an odalisque of 1857 which Aaron Scharf first linked to the corresponding photograph in the album; but this photograph, it appears, did not come from the set commissioned by Delacroix and is apparently a rare and perhaps unique instance in which the artist used a photograph in this way. The photographs which he commissioned must have been of limited value as models for composing paintings but gave him a sort of portable life-class from which he could make academic studies while travelling or while he was otherwise occupied outside his studio. The exhibition marked an immensely promising start to the new policy adopted by the Musée Delacroix of holding one major exhibition each year and accompanying this with a substantial publication. This first catalogue in the series, edited by Christophe Leribault, is filled with novelties and discoveries. It makes an important contribution to the study of Delacroix and should be on the shelves of anyone with the slightest interest in the artist or in the history of photography.
Joseph Blanc (–), peintre d’histoire et décorateur. By Pierre Sérié. Preface by Geneviève Lacambre. 306 pp. incl. 16 col. + 250 b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux et Ecole du Louvre, Paris, 2008), €50. ISBN 978–2–7118–5177–5. Reviewed by PETER COOKE THIS MONOGRAPH AND catalogue raisonné by Pierre Sérié is part of a recently established series devoted to outstanding mémoires de recherché de 3e cycle de l’Ecole du Louvre. This thesis, which won the prix de l’Association de l’Ecole du Louvre, suggests that research at the
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47. Perseus, by Joseph Blanc. 1869. Canvas, 300 by 172 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes).
aforementioned institution is in good health. The Ecole du Louvre and the Réunion des musées nationaux are to be congratulated on publishing a work that would not otherwise easily find a publisher, for it explores some of the more unfashionable areas of nineteenthcentury painting. Having won the Prix de Rome in 1867, Joseph Blanc began his career auspiciously: at the Salon of 1873 he attracted the enthusiastic attention of the marquis de Chennevières, Directeur des Beaux-arts under the République des ducs, with his large dynamic painting L’invasion. He was the youngest artist to receive a commission for the highly prestigious Pantheon project – the Clovis cycle. After 1886 Blanc ceased to exhibit at the Salon and devoted the rest of his career to executing public commissions as a mural painter. Apart from the well-illustrated and well-documented catalogue raisonné, with detailed and illuminating commentaries on individual works, the interest of the book lies primarily in the contextualisation and in the new light it casts on developments in history painting under the Third Republic. One of the merits of Sérié’s study is the way it contributes to further discrediting the superficial notion that the grand genre died with Delacroix in 1863 or with Ingres in 1867. For Joseph Blanc participated significantly in a spectacular revitalisation of history painting at the Salon in the first decade of the Third Republic. Taking advantage of the liberalising reforms of 1863, which encouraged individuality at the Ecole de Rome, he developed a remarkably unorthodox style. At the head of his contemporaries Luc-Olivier Merson, Pierre Lehoux and Edouard Toudouze, Blanc led a bold but short-lived neo-Mannerist
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revival, typified by his masterpieces Perseus (1869; Fig.47) and La délivrance (1876). These strikingly elegant and assured paintings not only challenged realism and naturalism but also subverted some of the accepted conventions of academic painting. In the process of following Blanc’s career and analysing his style, Sérié takes the reader on a tour through terra incognita. On the way we encounter such interesting figures as Blanc’s first teacher, the rather eccentric and very forgotten Emile Bin, and history painters of Blanc’s generation such as Oscar Mathieu, Tony Robert-Fleury, Henry Lévy, Benjamin-Constant, Joseph Sylvestre, Georges Becker, Gabriel Ferrier and Georges Rochegrosse. The presence of these figures – most of whom still languish in oblivion – is both a sobering reminder of just how neglected French academic painting still is and an encouraging sign of progress along the path of intelligent revisionism. The measured style of the book, which supports its claims with lucid formal analyses, Salon criticism and detailed documentation, including a good use of archival material, suggests that we are now ready to study the once despised domain of history painting with sufficient objectivity to do it some justice. The chapters devoted to ‘the general situation of history painting’ and ‘the renewal of the 1870s’ (pp.47–76) make a particularly valuable contribution to this vast project. This is not to deny the interest and importance of the rest of the book, which supports the thesis that, despite the success of the very republican JeanPaul Laurens, under the hostile pressure of a victorious naturalism, which soon became the official style of the Third Republic, and a lack of State encouragement, history painters tended to abandon the easel and take refuge in murals. Indeed, mural painting – or peinture décorative as the French then called it – became established as a genre distinct from, and superior to, narrative history painting. Partly thanks to the influence of Puvis de Chavannes, it found a new prestige in the decades 1880–1900. Without ever achieving the fame of Puvis, Blanc displayed a respect for the specific demands of mural painting that is in some ways comparable to that of his illustrious elder and which gained him the favour of the administration, if not of the public and the critics. Blanc never achieved the same degree of stylistic originality and coherence as Puvis, hampered as he was by his strong attachment to High Renaissance and Mannerist models. In the last years of Blanc’s life his attachment to drawing at the expense of colour put him at a disadvantage in the eyes of his contemporaries. However, his great academic competence and his status as a Prix de Rome winner enabled him to pursue an honourable, but not very well remunerated, career with major contributions to such important Paris monuments as the Hôtel de Ville and the Grand Palais. All in all, Sérié’s lavishly illustrated and beautifully produced monograph not only rescues from oblivion an unjustly forgotten painter but also makes a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of history painting and mural painting under the Third Republic.
Publications Received French art Vivant Denon et le Voyage pittoresque: un manuscrit inconnu (Ecrits d’artistes de la Collection Frits Lugt, vol.2). By Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey. 176 pp. incl. 27 col. + 3 b. & w. ills. (Fondation Custodia, Paris, 2009), €25. ISBN 978–90–78655–05–3. This is a scholarly transcription of a manuscript by Vivant Denon that served as the basis for the Voyage pittoresque de Naples et Sicile (1781–86) published by the Abbé Richard de Saint-Non. Acquired by the Fondation Custodia in 2000, the manuscript (not in Vivant Denon’s handwriting but by a copyist) corresponds both to the first part of the published Voyage, beginning on 26th October 1777 to the south of Lyon and ending with a visit to Pompeii at the beginning of 1778, and to notes added by Benjamin de Laborde to his French translation (1785–89) of Henry Swinburne’s Travels in the Two Sicilies (1783–85), to whom Denon had made his journal available following a disagreement with Saint-Non. However, there are many differences with these published texts and they are indicated by an elaborate system of annotations which are partly colour-coded, which, together with the introduction and a helpful chronology, makes it easier to get to the bottom of the labyrinth that is the history of this famous travel book. B.C. Impressionists by the Sea. By John House, with essay by David Hopkin. 155 pp. incl. 69 col. pls. + 27 ills. in col. + b. & w. (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007), £20. ISBN 978–1903973–89–9. Just over half the works catalogued in this publication are not by the Impressionists but by immediate forerunners such as Boudin and Jongkind and more remote figures such as Troyon and Isabey. But John House’s well-known interest in the crossovers between Salon painting and Impressionism, particularly, of course, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, made for a very satisfactory exhibition which started in London and toured to Washington and Hartford in 2007–08. His main text charts fairly well-known territory with plentiful mentions of new railway lines, guidebooks, hotels, mixed bathing and the summer influx of visitors to the Normandy coast overwhelming the local fishing population. (There is an amusing cartoon reproduced here of a fisherman expressing his surprise at the number of people dipping into the sea: ‘Life must be really filthy in Paris to make them come here so much to wash themselves’.) The push-and-pull of acceptable genre and innovative subject-matter provides the thrust of the essay. The show got into its stride with a great clutch of Monets, prefaced by pre-Impressionist scenes of 1864 such as the National Gallery’s Pointe de la Hève and ranging to his vertiginous view of the Channel and the cliffs at Pourville from the early 1880s. Along the way we have Gauguin at Dieppe and Renoir in Guernsey and, as the show’s last painting, Cassatt’s charming but muddled Children at the seashore, the sand and sea painted after the completion of the two girls, the marine setting almost an afterthought. The meaty part of the catalogue is contained in House’s excellent and extensive notes to each exhibit. It is here we get an idea of the physical practicalities of painting out of doors (e.g. the famous grains of sand embedded in the paint of Monet’s Beach at Trouville; National Gallery, London), the rapid changes in light and weather and how much work on a canvas was reserved for the studio. Renoir’s By the seashore (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) seems entirely retrospective and painted in Paris (the chair in which the young model sits would have been unlikely on a beach): we are a long way from the smell of sea air and herrings suggested by Monet. In its tight focus, this publication is an essential addition to the Impressionist literature. R.S.
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Exhibitions Van Dyck and Britain London by ELIZABETH HONIG
in the history of British art is that Anthony van Dyck radically changed the accepted aesthetic of portraiture and altered the course of its further development during the eight years that he spent in London between 1632 and his premature demise in 1641. Since the death of Hans Holbein almost a century earlier, in 1543, painting in England had consisted almost entirely of rather flat, linear portraiture. In these paintings, quite gorgeous in their own way, the sitters’ features were almost lost amid the highly wrought imitation of costume details – lace collars, brocade sleeves, embroidered bodices, fantastical shoe-roses. Costly clothing made a statement of wealth in Tudor times to a degree unimaginable today, and English patrons had good reason to favour artists who could meticulously record their sartorial investments and perhaps render the family’s coat of arms in the corner of the picture. But this choice put British art significantly outside the mainstream of Continental painting, where artists had found ways to indicate desirable personal characteristics in their sitters through facial expression, posture and gesture. Continental sitters were individuals whose inner virtues were reflected in their outward being; English patrons were members of dynasties endowed with wealth and good dress sense. English painters were not celebrated artists, not Raphaels and Rubenses; they were craftsmen, valued for their ability to record and imitate, but not looked to for interpretation or what the Italians would have termed ‘invention’. In the greatest Renaissance and Baroque portraits, the image gives a distinct sense of the sitting, an encounter between two individuals, artist and subject,1 which makes the beholder aware that the sitter is a living person, with a mind and a character, whom we too encounter as we stand before the image. Because we sense that Endymion Porter stood before Van Dyck in Antwerp around 1628 and presented himself to be painted (no.15; Fig.48), we also feel that he presents himself to us, and we feel licensed to assess certain aspects of his persona. He is a man of fashion and taste, but also a man of intellect and judgment, as dashing and clever as the young artist who painted him. The soft, muted folds of his great red cloak, the slashes of paint that register the reflection of light on his satin doublet, are accomplished with as much bravura as the sitter himself possesses.
A CENTRAL FACT
48. Portrait of Endymion Porter, by Anthony van Dyck. 1628. Canvas, 114.5 by 94 cm. (Private collection; exh. Tate Britain, London).
Porter was one of the earliest Englishmen to sit for Van Dyck, and he was to do so on several other occasions. In around 1633, then living in England, Van Dyck painted himself and Porter together in one oval frame (no.65). Porter, a bit heavier than he had been five years earlier, puts one hand on his hip and faces the beholder full on, his flashy silverwhite costume dominating the scene. The artist, clad in black, turns his body to face that of his friend, and fingers the edge of his cloak
as he looks over his shoulder at us. It is in many ways a remarkable painting, and certainly marks the first time when a painter in England could have dreamed of portraying himself alongside a patron as, in some sense, a friend. This was the remarkable status Van Dyck had achieved. The two portraits of Endymion Porter are among the many highlights of Van Dyck and Britain at Tate Britain, London (to 17th May). This is a beautiful exhibition, and has 49. Mountjoy Blount, 1st Earl of Newport, and George, Lord Goring, by Anthony van Dyck. c.1639. Canvas, 128.3 by 151.1 cm. (Egremont Collection, Petworth House, National Trust; exh. Tate Britain, London).
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proved deservedly popular with the public: when this reviewer saw it, on a weekday morning, it was crowded with people reading brochures and listening to audio guides, but mostly talking with one another about the sitters – commenting on attitudes, speculating about character traits, admiring costumes. It was noticeable that visitors were also attentive to the exhibition’s larger argument. For Karen Hearn has not simply mounted an updated version of Oliver Millar’s 1982 Van Dyck in England show at the National Portrait Gallery. The Tate exhibition intends to give visual form to the idea of Van Dyck’s impact on British portraiture. Although a larger show, the current exhibition has fewer works by Van Dyck himself – fifty-nine, against eightyseven in the 1982 show – but the ones it chooses are carefully selected and relate in a meaningful way to the many pre- and postVan Dyck portraits exhibited here. We are shown Van Dyck as the turning-point of an art-historical trajectory that begins with the late Tudor costume piece and ends with John Singer Sargent and other society portraitists of the early twentieth century. The show thus opens with a room of preVan Dyck portraiture and some early works by Van Dyck himself, featuring at its entrance two marvellous portraits of royal children (nos.1 and 2) by the gifted but essentially conservative Robert Peake. Both works come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as does the early Van Dyck Self-portrait (no.5) that hangs near them and makes such a stunning contrast. Peake’s Princess Elizabeth is all discipline and detail while Van Dyck gives himself a new kind of casual elegance that foreshadows what he would bring to patrons in Britain. His pose seems artless, oddly more reticent than that of the princess, slightly restless. The painter’s great black cloak occupies over a third of the canvas, while his longfingered hand gently touches the soft silk shirt that just escapes the cloak’s envelope. Elizabeth is a field of legible signs; Van Dyck is a sophisticated cypher. This first room has many intriguing items and clever hangs – Van Dyck’s early portrait of the Earl of Arundel (no.7) against Daniel Mytens’s attempt to imitate it with Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (no.8), is another winner. And to have here Van Dyck’s absolutely extraordinary early paintings (nos.9 and 10) of Sir Robert Shirley and Teresa, Lady Shirley, while their portraits by an anonymous artist hang across town in the British Museum’s Shah cAbbas exhibition (to 14th June; to be reviewed) is a unique treat. In general, though, part of what makes this first room so exciting is that it does something that the rest of the show avoids: it mingles pictures by Van Dyck directly with the images they speak to, about or even against. Van Dyck’s fluid painterly style, his tricks in convincing you that he has an intimate understanding of each sitter’s character and is letting you in on the secret, are clearly juxtaposed with the mild effect of visual transcription with which his contemporary portraitists present their patrons.
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50. Frances, Lady Buckhurst, Later Countess of Dorset, by Anthony van Dyck. c.1637. Canvas, 187 by 128 cm. (Sackville Collection, Knole, National Trust; exh. Tate Britain, London).
Beyond this introduction the exhibition has great connections to make but it expects the visitor to make them, often over long distances. Van Dyck’s works are alone in the three main rooms. The decision to isolate the artist is understandable but it leads to some missed opportunities. For instance, Cornelius Johnson’s sweet but bland portrait of Sir Thomas Hanmer (no.16) in the first room makes a startling contrast to Van Dyck’s rendering of him (no.54) two rooms later. The works have been brought together to the Tate but are still visually separated: the visitor has to be alert enough to remember that we have seen this man somewhere before, and to go back to the other room to recall how different he looked under Johnson’s brush. Likewise, Karen Hearn has scored a great coup by bringing to the show, from Alnwick, Titian’s stunning double-portrait of Cardinal Georges d’Armagnac and his secretary Guillaume Philandrier (no.11), but it has been hung in a different room from the Van Dyck painting it inspired, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, with Sir Philip Mainwaring (no.57). The divided hanging matters much less with the post-Van Dyck rooms at the end of the show. Oliver Cromwell’s sash-tying page in the Robert Walker portrait of 1649 (no.49) relates back with stunning exactness to the boy who tied a sash on the Royalist commander George, Lord Goring, in Van Dyck’s great double-portrait (no.58; Fig.49) of a decade earlier. The echo is so clear because Walker is a second-rate artist imitating a great one; Van Dyck’s own dialogues are more subtle, and the show’s hanging could have made more of them. The arrangement also misses the opportunity to interrogate portrait types that Van Dyck
explored and developed. For instance, in this review I have mentioned three double-portraits from the show. What we often call the ‘friendship portrait’ was a type that was known in England from early Tudor times, Holbein’s Ambassadors standing as its most famous early example. But Van Dyck, drawing on more Continental models, turned the double-portrait into a special genre, providing an elegant statement of dual personality and mutual interest that conformed specifically to the values of the early Stuart court. When George, Lord Goring, chooses to be shown not only with his sash-tying page but also with his friend and ally Mountjoy Blount, 1st Earl of Newport, he positions himself in a specific way. He is the calm, withdrawn, pensive one to Blount’s active turn towards and visual engagement with the beholder; he allows himself to be adorned, by his page, while Blount grasps and holds his own sash. This careful complementarity, conveyed by gazes, poses, gestures and attitudes, tends to be characteristic of Van Dyck’s double-portraits. The two sitters, we understand, are bound together as much by subtle individual differences as by shared goals and allegiances. The Tate show features far more of the double-portraits than did the 1982 exhibition, along with several wonderful later portraits inspired by them, but they are scattered over all the different rooms and not considered together in any way, either visually or in the catalogue.2 Another aspect of Van Dyck’s portraiture that becomes evident here is how bland his images of women are compared to those of men. This is largely because the qualities admired in a seventeenth-century woman were far more limited than those that might positively characterise a man. Van Dyck’s men may be inquisitive and thoughtful, or bold and courageous; they can be cultivated and elegant, or stern and resolute, or any subtle combination of these things. Thus almost every male portrait in the show seems to have its own specific character: even a pretty straightforward work, such as the late portrait of Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke (no.44), gives us an almost unsettling conviction that we are confronted with a unique, powerful, rather difficult individual. But a woman’s main virtue was to be beautiful, and in paintings this is inflected mostly by the degree to which she engages semiflirtatiously with us or resists our gaze. We might project a certain personality onto Frances, Lady Buckhurst (no.39; Fig.50), a fifteen-year-old girl whose sedate movement across the canvas seems to register a graceful passage from girlhood to adulthood. But Frances is little more than a type, one that Van Dyck re-used, element by element, in a good number of portraits of marriageable young girls, including one of Frances’s own niece, Lady Anne Carey, in the Frick Collection, New York. Even the facial features between various pictures bear a more than merely familial resemblance to one another: they tend towards a norm of adolescent prettiness, altered just enough to register the appearance
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of the individual, but not endowed with any distinctive character. Indeed, the same formula is used for adult prettiness in the stunning portrait of Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle (no.43), that hangs across the room. The display at Tate does not demand that we address these or any other issues about Van Dyck’s work. The portraits are grouped in the main rooms without much logic other than, perhaps, family connections – all the Killigrews in a row, for instance. This may register how the sitters conceived of their portraits as records of dynastic position and allegiance, but to the modern viewer it is less interesting and does not do justice to the strong overall argument and impressive individual loans that have been brought together in this exhibition. 1 See H. Berger: Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance, Stanford 2000. 2 Catalogue: Van Dyck and Britain. By Karen Hearn, with contributions by Tabitha Barber, Tim Batchelor, Christopher Breward, Christopher Brown, Diana Dethloff, Emilie Gordenker, Susan North, Kevin Sharpe, Susan Sloman, Simon Turner and Robert Upstone. 256 pp. incl. 179 col. + 10 b. & w. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2009), £29.99 (PB). ISBN 978–1–85437–858–3; £40 (HB). ISBN 978–1–85437–795–1. This is happily slender in comparison to many recent exhibition catalogues. Liberated from the need to dwell on details of provenance etc. by the massive Van Dyck catalogue raisonné (S.J. Barnes et al.: Van Dyck: The Complete Paintings, New Haven and London 2004), the authors instead simply give a general historical background to Van Dyck’s production, an essay on costume history and then brief introductions to each section of the exhibition; entries provide the pertinent facts about each sitter and a context for the way Van Dyck has portrayed them.
Le Corbusier Rotterdam, Weil-am-Rhein, Lisbon, Liverpool and London by COLIN AMERY
51. NotreDame-duHaut chapel, Ronchamp, by Le Corbusier. 1950–52. Photograph. (Exh. Barbican Art Gallery, London).
there is a new younger audience that is not fully aware of the extent of Le Corbusier’s artistic influence and that it is also time to approach him less through intellectual means than by rediscovering him through ‘sensuous perception’.1 This is an original and interesting approach to the organisation of an architectural exhibition, and one that is remarkably successful – particularly at London’s own Corbusian creation, the Barbican itself. The exhibition is a touring one, starting life at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam and progressing via the Vitra Design Museum; the Museu Berado, Lisbon; and finally arriving in England last October (with substantial help from the RIBA Trust), to be shown first in the crypt of Liverpool’s Roman Catholic cathedral of Christ the King as part of that city’s year as a European City of Culture, and then in London. It was a brave move to place the life and work of Le Corbusier in the remarkable spaces of the crypt of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s unfinished cathedral. While it was a brilliant
opportunity to see and enjoy the giant scale and constructional calibre of Lutyens’s design, the space did not serve Le Corbusier particularly well for his work was dwarfed and made to feel exceptionally alien. The curators decided to divide Le Corbusier’s career into three sections: ‘Contexts’, ‘Privacy and Publicity’ and ‘Built Art’. Within the narrative of each of these, the major themes in his work are explored. In an attempt to humanise him early in his career, unusual emphasis is placed on his interest in the Mediterranean and the Orient. There is a tenuous effort to relate his admiration of the curvaceous Arab women he drew in Algeria to a development of more organic forms in both his painting and his architecture in the 1930s. His paintings and some sculpture are exhibited alongside his drawings that explore the new architectural technologies and constructional media in a way that fulfils the curators’ aim to assist the visitor towards a holistic understanding of Le Corbusier’s œuvre. After all, one of his own strongest motivations was
I T W A S I N S P R I NG 1987, in the brutal setting of the Hayward Gallery, London, that Britain last saw a major exhibition of the work of the Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier (pseudonym of Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris) who was born in Switzerland in 1887 and died in France in 1965. That centenary exhibition was somewhat immodestly entitled Le Corbusier – Architect of the Century. The current exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (to 24th May), is simply called Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture. It would be a perfectly fair question to ask why hold another major exhibition, showing much of the same material, only twenty-one years later? The answer is clearly given by the originators of this show, the Vitra Design Museum, Weil-am-Rhein, and the three specialists who curated the exhibition – Stanislaus von Moos, Arthur Rüegg and Mateo Kries. In the major book-catalogue that accompanies the touring display they write that they feel
52. Fitted kitchen from Unité d’Habitation de Marseille, by Le Corbusier. 1945. Photograph. (Photographie industriele du Sud Ouest; exh. Barbican Art Gallery, London).
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the idea of the ‘synthèse des arts’ which led to the typically Corbusian connection between architecture, sculpture, urban planning, painting, design and film. The particular value of this exhibition is that it succeeds in establishing a balance between the role of aesthetics and Le Corbusier’s more dangerous faith in his mechanistic doctrine that modern architecture and cities had to evolve simply in order to provide more effective and more modern ‘machines for living in’. Because of the substantial loans from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, including twenty of his own paintings, eight good sculptures, representative examples of his exceptional furniture (of which replicas are on sale in the Barbican’s shop), first editions of his books and many original drawings and plans, a more personal and rounded view of the architect emerges. There is the desk he designed for his mother and vases he bought on a journey in the Balkans. The presence of works by contemporaries such as Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Amédée Ozenfant, Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian help to contextualise Le Corbusier’s own work and artistic influences. Unfortunately, Le Corbusier’s own paintings reveal him as an artist of only slight interest – he was no Léger. But among further highlights of the exhibition are the monumental mural painting by Le Corbusier from his Paris office in rue de Sèvres, a large-scale model of the Philips Pavilion (1958) that reflects Le Corbusier’s anticipation of today’s computergenerated architecture, and original film footage shot by the architect in Arcachon and Rio de Janeiro. How well does the exhibition explain his architecture and his more manic ideas about urbanism? He has been both one of the most respected and most reviled figures of twentieth-century architecture and planning. His influence on architects in Britain has been remarkable despite the fact that he built no British buildings. A fascinating anthology with an important bibliography has just been published2 that reveals the diversity of response from the architectural profession and the public to Le Corbusier as an author, social visionary, architect and artist. This range is hard to explain in an exhibition, and his most important architectural works are represented in an orthodox way by both original and newly built models, drawings and photographs. Some reconstructed interiors demonstrate his conception of domestic space. Particularly intriguing is the full-scale mock-up of a typical fitted kitchen from the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (Fig.52) – it is unremarkable. The third dimension is so often what is inevitably missing in architectural exhibitions and the fine models cannot bring to life the numinous atmosphere of the chapel of NotreDame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (Fig.51) or the concrete power of the government buildings at Chandigarh (Fig.53). At the London exhibition, actually being in the Barbican itself is more than an indication of how a giant Corbusian concrete structure would look and feel
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53. Palais de l’Assemblée, Chandigarh, by Le Corbusier. 1955. Photograph. (Exh. Barbican Art Gallery).
and the building is a major player in the success of this show. Powerful too are the clips of film of Chandigarh under construction in the 1950s and the rather precious glimpse in another film clip of Charles de Beistegui’s rooftop apartment in the centre of Paris. Most powerful and alarming of all is the short film of Le Corbusier introducing his utopian master plan for Paris, the Plan Voisin of 1925, with the architect obliterating acres of Paris with the energy of a dictator planning an air raid (a reconstruction of his model for this is also on view). London has enjoyed two major architectural exhibitions this past winter – Le Corbusier at the Barbican and Andrea Palladio’s five-hundredth anniversary exhibition from Vicenza remounted at the Royal Academy.3 They provide an unusual opportunity to consider how well the life and work of major architects are conveyed away from their buildings in static exhibition displays. And they resist the question of how accessible architecture is to the exhibition-going public and whether architecture can only really be experienced first hand. Palladio had the advantage of the exhibition devoted to him being first shown in his own city of Vicenza and in the Palazzo Barbaran da Porto that he designed and built between 1570 and 1575. It was thrilling to go from the exhibition to his villas and to the Teatro Olimpico and there is no doubt that the learned research on the walls enhanced understanding of the context and creative impetus behind the neighbouring buildings. Curiously, however, Palladio appeared to gain much more from the clarity of the design of the exhibition at the Royal Academy conceived by Eric Parry. As a distinguished and very successful practising architect (he has recently completed the rejuvenation of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields), Parry’s design for the RA exhibition brilliantly conveyed Palladio’s working creative powers. He did this by providing two approaches through the exhibition: visitors
could take the broad highway through the magnificent models; enjoy the portraits and the contextual Canalettos and the juxtapositions of the Veronese and the Villa Barbaro at Maser. This gave a confident and clear view of Palladio’s innovative architectural achievements. If the visitor wanted to understand more of the mind and thought processes of the architect, Parry had created another route around the walls, on which the extensive collection of drawings were spaciously shown and well captioned. Had he consciously designed one route for specialists and one for less well-informed visitors? While models in both the Palladio and Le Corbusier exhibitions were key to an initial understanding of the buildings, it was by studying the drawings that visitors could begin to relate to the design process. Film and photography were used in both exhibitions but scarcely adequately. We are all used to looking at screens in order to learn; more brilliant photography and projection could have provided an easier entry point for the understanding of complex buildings – many of which are hard to visit – and their settings. The computer projections that architects use today to seduce their clients would be ideal tools to help the public into the third dimension of architecture and animate it in a memorable way. While scholarship must continue to inform exhibitions and catalogues, perhaps video artists are needed to expose the beauties of architecture with a fresh eye. 1 Catalogue: Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture. Edited by Alexander von Vegesack, with contributions by Stanislaus von Moos, Jean-Louis Cohen, Arthur Rüegg, Beatriz von Colomina, Mateo Kries and Charles Knevitt. 398 pp. incl. numerous ills. in col. + b. & w. (Vitra Design Museum, Weil-am-Rhein, 2007), £40. ISBN 978–3–931–93672–3. 2 Le Corbusier and Britain. An Anthology. By Irene Murray and Julian Osley. 344 pp. incl. 50 col. + 95 b. & w. ills. (Routledge, London, 2008), £34.99. ISBN 978–0–4154–7994–3. 3 Reviewed by Deborah Howard in this Magazine, 151 (2009), pp.182–84.
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Constable Portraits London and Compton Verney by HUGH BELSEY
Constable Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery, London (to 14th June), and then at Compton Verney (27th June to 6th September), is an intimate biographical sweep of the artist’s portraiture from his hesitant beginnings to depictions of Constable by his friends Charles Robert Leslie and Daniel Maclise in the early 1830s.1 The journey is cleverly grounded with a few landscapes that remind the visitor of Constable’s true metier and that it was only the cajoling of a misunderstanding family and the need for easy money that made him spread his wings and toy with portraiture. As an artist with a fresh and original approach to landscape painting, an artist who, in his own words, ‘should paint my own places best – Painting is but another word for feeling’, it is hardly surprising that he responded with greatest effect to the faces he knew best.2 When his portrait painting is direct, uncluttered by outside interference, his work is at its finest. The exhibition is prefaced by the polished portrait of Constable by Ramsay Richard Reinagle of 1799 and the more concentrated self-portrait profile drawn in 1806 (cat. nos.1 and 2). The first section, ‘The Family at East Bergholt’, begins with a portrait of the artist’s father, Golding Constable (no.3), looking younger than his mid-seventies, and a second portrait (no.4), painted some ten years earlier, T H E E X H I B I T I ON
54. Portrait of Mary Freer, by John Constable. 1809. Canvas, 76.2 by 63.5 cm. (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; exh. National Portrait Gallery, London).
which has also recently been identified as a portrait of his father. However, the physiognomy is too diverse (the heads are a different shape) and the original identity of Dr Thomas Lechmere Grimwood, headmaster at Dedham Grammar School, is preferable. The sitter is shown about to rise from his chair with a no-nonsense expression and a proprietorial hand resting on a large tome; a more likely demeanour for a schoolmaster than a prosperous miller. The artist’s siblings include Abram, in a portrait that apes the pose of the 1806 self-portrait, and a double-portrait of two of Constable’s sisters, Ann and Mary (no.9), which show a real affection and, in the case of another study of his favourite sister, Mary (no.10), an intimacy that is usually associated with French painting. With the copying of old masters, especially portraits associated with the Dysart family, Constable lost his confidence and we see him imitating Gainsborough’s techniques (Portrait of James Lloyd; no.16), attempting to follow examples set by Hoppner (Portrait of Master Crosby; no.21), Lawrence (Portrait of Henry Greswold Lewis; no.23) and Daniel Gardner (in the portrait of Thomasine Copping, which is in the show though omitted from the catalogue section, but illustrated on p.22). The Barker group portrait (no.22) was inspired by Reynolds’s Lamb children, a composition known to him through Bartolozzi’s print,3 but in comparison the Constable looks staid and flimsy and the sitters are distinctly ill at ease in the grandeur of the traditional portrait setting. The informal and speedy pencil sketches made when Constable was staying at Brathay Hall in
55. Portrait of Mrs James Pulham, by John Constable. 1818. Canvas, 75.6 by 62.9 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; exh. National Portrait Gallery, London).
1808 are a reminder that Constable finds his own voice when he portrays his friends and family. Interestingly some veer towards caricature (Music party at Brathay Hall; no.15). He shows a particular empathy when he paints young women and his portrait of Jane Anne Mason (no.14) and the Opie-like portrait of Mary Freer (no.24; Fig.54) are of a higher calibre and herald the intensity distilled in the portrait of his fiancée, Maria Bicknell (no.27), which always travelled with him. The same concentration is shown in the likeness of his great friend the Revd John Fisher (although not in that of his wife; nos.29 and 30) and in the focus given to pictures of his offspring (especially nos.38 and 40). The sketch of Maria Constable with three of their children (no.39) appears to be a sketch for a previously unpublished finished canvas (illustrated in the catalogue on p.49) whose whereabouts is unknown. It is worth noting that the little boy in the oil-sketch holds the same pose as the youngster in the portrait of the Barker children but looks very much more at home. With the pressure of providing for a growing family, Constable began to paint portraits again and the three depictions of members of the Walker family, brother, sister and daughter (nos.34 and 35), are among his best: sympathetic, direct, uncomplicated and beautifully observed. The portrait of the Revd Dr William Walker (reproduced p.26) was unavailable for the exhibition and has been substituted with one of the Revd Dr John Wingfield (no.33), which has something of the same intensity and power. The other exceptional late portrait is that of Mrs Pulham (no.32; Fig.55). Constable was out to impress (the sitter and her husband, a successful solicitor, were to purchase some of his landscapes) and, judging from the pentimenti, it was a painting (or a sitter) that caused him difficulties and he went out of his way to satisfy.4 the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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In many ways this exhibition highlights the difficulties of a British portrait painter at the turn of the nineteenth century and, with the exception of his last portraits, Constable only reached these goals when he was able to express a very special affection for his sitters. It is interesting that the organisers felt it necessary to justify their subject by quoting Lucian Freud – ‘I’ve always thought that it was completely loopy for people to go on about [. . .] English portrait painters, and not to have Constable among them’5 – but the exhibition stands on its own. As a portraitist Constable is inconsistent but, at his best, he shows the characteristics – courage, tenacity, humanity and perception – that we expect in his work. 1 Catalogue: Constable Portraits: The Painter and his Circle. By Martin Gayford and Anne Lyles. 160 pp. incl. 73 col. + 3 b. & w. ills. (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2009), £18.99. ISBN 978–1–85514–398–2. 2 A letter from Constable to Fisher dated 23rd October 1821; see R.B. Beckett, ed.: John Constable’s Correspondence, Ipswich 1968, VI, p.78. 3 D. Mannings: Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, New Haven and London 2000, pp.297–98, no.1081, fig.1411. 4 At some stage of the painting the sitter appears to have worn ringlets, visible beside the sitter’s right cheek; there also appear to be changes in the dress. 5 W. Feaver et al.: exh. cat. Constable. Le choix de Lucian Freud, Paris (Grand Palais) 2002, p.26. Freud’s comments appear in English in Lucian Freud on John Constable with William Feaver, London 2003, p.27.
Treasures of the Black Death London by JOHN CHERRY O F T E N H A V E unexpected results. The pogroms and slaughter of the Jews in Germany at the time of the Black Death in 1348–49 were terrible events. Although the property and possessions of the Jews were seized, the concealment of some of their treasures has afforded later generations the opportunity of admiring some of the coins, ingots and jewellery owned by those whose lives ended so appallingly. Their gold and silver jewellery, even their wedding rings; the coins and ingots that served as their capital; the silver bowls and beakers that adorned their tables – all these have been removed from the earth and rubble. Six principal hoards are known from Poland, Germany and eastern France. The latest was found in Erfurt, Germany, in 1998, and was exhibited, together with the Colmar hoard, found at the end of the nineteenth century, at the Cluny Museum, Paris, in 2007. The exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London (to 10th May), is a second version, which, like the first, has been curated by Christine Descatoire of the Cluny Museum. Both exhibitions mark a valuable collaboration between French and German museums and curators.
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56. Jewish marriage ring, with bezel symbolising the Temple, containing a tiny golden ball, inscribed in Hebrew ‘Mazel tov’ (good wishes). Early fourteenth century. Gold, 4.7 cm. high. (Erfurt treasure; exh. Wallace Collection, London).
To show jewellery, often so minute in size, is difficult and challenging. Both hoards consist of many tiny objects – rings, brooches, spangles and belt fittings, as well as coins and, in the case of Erfurt, there are a remarkable series of ingots (cat. nos.6–8). The exhibition space is divided into three. First a cut-out in the wall reveals a picture of the whole hoard. Secondly, we are shown the coins, ingots and maps of the origins of coins in the two hoards to give their geographical context. In the case of Erfurt, the sculptural context is also shown by the use of excellent photographs by Uwe Gaasch of the Wise and Foolish Virgins from the portal of Erfurt Cathedral, where the swaying bodies display their belts and brooches to fine effect. More might have been made here of the context of the find in Erfurt. There could have been a map of the town and photographs of the recently discovered mikweh (ritual bath), very close to the site of the find. The third space at the Wallace displays the jewellery, rings and silver in cases arranged in an oval around a central case containing three marriage rings. One is from Colmar (no.2), an unusual silver example is from Weissenfels (no.3), and the finest of all is from Erfurt (no.1; Fig.56). All show buildings, which may represent the Temple. The Erfurt ring with its pointed windows, tracery and pinnacles shows the Jewish goldsmith who created the ring to be entirely up to date with contemporary fashion. For those of us brought up in the Puginian tradition of Gothic as the true Christian architecture it is fascinating to see how this style was used by non-Christians. Some pieces, such as the marriage rings and the rings with star and crescent, are undoubtedly Jewish. How far other items such as cups
and silver were Jewish, or whether they were Christian items given in pawn, is more of an open question. Descatoire sees the set of eight cups as Jewish (no.9; Fig.57) and the doublecup (nos.15 and 16) as perhaps a pair of marriage cups. If this is so, the question of the relevance of the depiction of Aesop’s Fables in the base of the cups for the Jewish marriage celebrations becomes a very interesting one. Many of the items of jewellery and the belts have a clear amatory message seen through the use of the words for love – either ‘Amor’ or ‘Lieb’ – the use of clasped hands or the bow and arrow of Cupid. Perhaps Christian and Jewish romance jewellery was indistinguishable. That the exhibition provokes such questions is a mark of its success. The jewellery (Fig.58) is well displayed and cases, made for another purpose, are skilfully re-used. The jewellery is top lit. The provision of magnifying glasses enables the visitor to undertake a microscopic study of fine detail. However, the visitor will need extraordinary eyesight to see the details of the animals on the dress ornament (no.51). The relative scale of the objects can only be appreciated by studying the actual objects in the cases, since the photographs which are thoughtfully intended to aid appreciation and recognition of the numbers are reproduced at a variety of scales, and illustrations in the accompanying catalogue are often reproduced in a haphazard series of scales on the same page. The silver, especially the flagon (no.10) and the nest of beakers, suffers from the top lighting, which fails to show up the shape and sides adequately. If visitors want to get to grips with this exhibition, they must buy and read the catalogue,1 which is enlarged in both content and size from the Cluny exhibition. The main addition is an excellent survey by Marian Campbell of the material evidence for the Jews in Britain, or rather in England, until their expulsion in 1290. The Jews could not be blamed for the Black Death in England. The well-illustrated catalogue combines essays on the two hoards with descriptions
57. Stacking beaker from a set of eight. Early fourteenth century. Parcel gilt silver, ranging from 5 to 11.8 cm. high. (Erfurt treasure; exh. Wallace Collection, London).
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58. Brooch. Late thirteenth century. Gold, set with sapphire garnets and pearls, diameter 7 cm. (Erfurt treasure; exh. Wallace Collection, London).
principally by Descatoire and Maria Stürzebecher. More of the excellent research embedded in the catalogue could have been brought to the attention of the visitor in the labels to the exhibition. It is a pity that not more is said in the Wallace exhibition about our knowledge of the Jewish community in Erfurt with their remarkable surviving manuscripts and buildings. The Erfurt hoard was displayed in New York in autumn 2008 and will be permanently shown in Erfurt in the recently discovered synagogue there from October 2009. The Wallace is to be congratulated both on bringing this French and German material to London and for promoting this exhibition of Continental medieval jewellery. 1 Catalogue: Treasures of the Black Death. Edited by Christine Descatoire, with contributions by Marian Campbell, Christoph Cluse, Christine Descatoire, Michel Dhénin, Timothy Husband, Johann Michael Fritz, Oliver Meckling, Jörg R. Müller, Mario Schlapke, Karin Sczech and Maria Stürzebecher. 112 pp. incl. 90 col. ills. (Paul Holberton Publishing/Wallace Collection, London, 2009), £25. ISBN 978–0–900785–95–5.
famous comment by Fuseli on the landscapes of another artist, Constable, that they made him call for his great coat and umbrella, such watercolours embody ‘that strange alchemy by which seemingly random brushstrokes could become convincing and powerful representations of natural phenomena’, as eloquently expressed by Scott Wilcox, the exhibition’s curator, in the substantial and handsome catalogue.1 Sun, Wind, and Rain is the successor to an exhibition of similar size held in Birmingham and London in 1983–84, marking the bicentenary of Cox’s birth in 1783. Visitors expecting a simple re-run of that will be happily surprised, for only about one-third of the items in the present show overlap with its forerunner’s content. In his choice of exhibits, Wilcox offers a fresh interpretation informed by several decades of research and reflection on Cox. He deploys works from the Yale Center for British Art (a good number acquired under his curatorship there) and several other American museums, as well as from British collections, not least Birmingham’s. The careful selection, while avoiding the pitfall of repetition, ensures that we see the full range of Cox’s production from his early watercolour beginnings, in the manner of Varley and Girtin, through to the later oils and the boldly handled, very late Welsh watercolours, which perpetuate the Burkean Sublime well into the Victorian period. Many of the exhibits do indeed evince ‘that strange alchemy’, while the others, at the very least, are of great interest in illuminating Cox’s far-from-straightforward artistic development. The watercolours are generally in unfaded condition, many of the larger exhibition pieces retaining their original close-fitting gilt frames (though sadly not the Junction of the
Severn and Wye with Chepstow in the distance, of 1830; no.54). Interestingly, and probably wisely, Cox’s oil paintings, mostly dating from after his move to Harborne from London in 1841, are underplayed numerically: only fourteen are included among a total of 121 catalogued items by Cox – even though, as Stephen Wildman informs us in his essay on the subject, the artist painted over three hundred works in the medium. In this connection, the newly discovered Sunset, Hastings: beached fishing vessels is an important addition to the small group of oil-sketches made at Hastings in 1811 (no.14). Significantly punctuating Cox’s career are the sketches of urban scenes executed on his travels to the Low Countries and France in 1826, 1829 (no.47; Fig.60) and 1832, a splendid, coherent group which forms a high point of the exhibition. They are atypical of Cox in their concern for topographical accuracy, which extends to the recording of names on shop and street signs, and in often being of upright format. Deft washes of colour enliven precise underlying, but still visible, drawing in graphite, while the bustle of city life animates the architectural settings, together creating a sparkling counterpoint. The fine example illustrated here has something approaching a clear blue sky, a rarity in Cox’s work. The thoughtfulness of the selection is matched at Birmingham by a sensitivity of display, utilising highly successful background colours. A pleasantly labyrinthine route leads the visitor through the sections plotting Cox’s career, affording enticing vistas to landmarks ahead. Most particularly, we are able to glimpse the very large late oil, Rhyl Sands, of 1854–55, from several distant vantage points before finally encountering it at close quarters (no.112). Recent critical comment has tended to focus,
David Cox New Haven and Birmingham by RICHARD GREEN T H E E X H I B I T I ON Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox, previously at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and now at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (to 3rd May), where it was seen by this reviewer, marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s death in 1859, in his native city of Birmingham. The show takes its title from a watercolour of 1845 epitomising Cox’s supreme skill in capturing the rapidly changing effects of English (and Welsh) weather, for which he was so much admired in his lifetime and the ensuing decades (cat. no.77; Fig.59). Inevitably bringing to mind the
59. Sun, wind and rain, by David Cox. 1845. Watercolour over traces of graphite and black chalk with scratchingout on wove paper, 46.4 by 60.5 cm. (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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60. Porte St-Denis, Paris, by David Cox. c.1829. Watercolour over graphite on wove paper, 36.5 by 25.8 cm. (Private collection, courtesy of Andrew Wyld; exh. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).
at the expense of this large version, on the two smaller, less-finished oils of the subject, all-tooeasy comparisons being made between them and Boudin’s beach scenes and Impressionism, which Wilcox downplays (Manchester City Art Gallery and no.111). However, the sympathetic presentation of the large version here restores to an over-familiar work its freshness, breadth and power, which tell at every distance. We appreciate Cox’s masterful command of his audience as we readily yield to a sense of actually being there on the salt-sprayed beach beneath the wind-swept silvery clouds. The main thrust of Wilcox’s catalogue essay is that Cox was far from being Ruskin’s ‘simple-minded’ artist with an intuitive gift for capturing the effects of nature. While we might not fully accept his argument for an intellectual dimension to Cox’s art, Wilcox nevertheless provides many great insights. He has been ably supported by a team of fellowcontributors. In an informative discussion of Cox’s relationship with Birmingham, Victoria Osborne neatly dispels the myth that the young artist discovered the hanged body of his first master, the miniaturist Albert Feidler, after his supposed suicide. This revelation reinforces the caution with which we necessarily treat the accounts of Cox’s life given by his two Victorian biographers, Solly and Hall, whose propensity for myth-making forms the basis of an engaging essay by Greg Smith. From Peter Bower we learn that Cox’s favoured watercolour support, the coarse handmade wrapping paper which he referred to as ‘Scotch’, was manufactured at Langley Mill in County Durham. Lastly, Charles Nugent’s hard-hitting essay on David Cox Jr and forgers of his father’s work should be required reading for any serious student approaching Cox for the first time.
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Returning to the Birmingham watercolour known as Sun, wind and rain, it is important to note that this title is an accrued one, rather than demonstrably Cox’s own. The artist’s only recorded hint at a title is his reference to the oil version, also painted in 1845 and of identical size, as Wind, rain and sunshine (no.78; displayed alongside). However, the oil differs from the watercolour in one crucial respect: it lacks the railway train steaming across the horizon. This small but very particular feature in the watercolour and the supposed tripartite title have suggested to previous commentators a homage on Cox’s part to Turner’s Rain, steam and speed, exhibited the year before. Wilcox gives no certain provenance for the watercolour until 1925, but states that it was perhaps the work entitled ‘Wind, Rain, and Storm’ which was in the Peter Allen collection until 1869. Lot 81, dated 1845, in the Allen sale at Christie’s on 6th March 1869 (selling for 395 gns, to Agnew) was actually catalogued as ‘Wind, Rain, and Steam’ (reviewer’s italics). Given the extreme rarity of ‘steam’ in Cox’s work, this not only significantly enhances the probability that Allen owned the watercolour in question but, in so doing, also provides a clear indication of what its original title might have been. Furthermore, there can be little doubt that the Birmingham watercolour is the ‘drawing’ which later appeared at Christie’s, as lot 12 in the Mrs Stern sale of 19th June 1908 (selling for 210 gns, to Tooth), again as ‘Wind, Rain and Steam’: the measurements given correspond precisely.2 If we accept for the Birmingham watercolour the title Wind, rain and steam, which nicely distinguishes it from the oil’s Wind, rain and sunshine on the basis of the key difference between the two, this would endorse the previously perceived Turnerian inflection of the former. New Haven and Birmingham have done full justice to David Cox in this celebratory year. Thoughtfully selected, impressively catalogued and perfectly presented, the exhibition gives us much both to enjoy now and to ponder in the decades ahead – until the presumed next great celebration in 2033, the 250th anniversary of Cox’s birth. 1 Catalogue: Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox. By Scott Wilcox, with contributions by Peter Bower, Charles Nugent, Victoria Osborne, Greg Smith and Stephen Wildman. 272 pp. incl. 252 col. ills. (Yale Center for British Art and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), £40. ISBN 978–0–300–11744–8. Cat. no.6 was not exhibited at New Haven, and neither it nor no.107 are in the Birmingham showing. However, the exhibition includes, ex-catalogue, the recently discovered watercolour of The Pont des Arts with the Louvre and the Tuileries from the Quai Conti, Paris, c.1838, lent by the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Cumbria, and further watercolours from a private collection, as well as works of biographical relevance by other artists from Birmingham’s own collection. 2 A smaller work, catalogued as ‘Rain, Wind and Steam [sic]’, was lot 31 in the Humphrey Roberts sale, Christie’s, London, 21st May 1908. I am grateful to Marijke Booth and Lynda McLeod of Christie’s, London, for their help.
Giorgio de Chirico Paris by SILVIA LORETI THE VAST RETROSPECTIVE of Giorgio de Chirico’s long career on display at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (to 24th May)1 shows, bravely and unashamedly, the whole of the artist’s sometimes puzzling trajectory. Although one hundred years have passed since de Chirico experienced his first metaphysical ‘revelations’ in Florence, this is the first large exhibition that attempts, through paintings, graphic works, sculptures and written documents, to account for his multiple and at times shocking stylistic evolutions. Since the early 1980s, when a series of retrospectives concentrated on the first decade of his career,2 much work has been done, most notably by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Paolo Baldacci,3 to free the appreciation of de Chirico’s post-1918 work from the anathema cast upon it first by the Surrealists and later by Alfred H. Barr and James T. Soby.4 Following recent exhibitions stressing the continuity between the artist’s early and late years,5 the exceptionally rich Paris retrospective sets out to show that the cosmopolitan de Chirico – born in Greece of Italian parents, educated in Germany and frequently living in Paris – continued his artistic journey across most of the twentieth century, and not necessarily in the wrong lane. From the 1920s de Chirico produced copies and variations of his earlier works, for example the 1972 version of The disquieting muses in the present exhibition (cat. no.14) which was first painted in 1918. However, as the exhibition demonstrates, the idea of reproducibility was at the heart of de Chirico’s aesthetic, and must be considered independently from his
61. Self portrait in red costume, by Giorgio de Chirico. 1945. Canvas, 66 by 51 cm. (Private collection; exh. Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris).
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62. Piazza with Ariadne, by Giorgio de Chirico. 1913. Canvas, 135.6 by 180.5 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; exh. Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris).
later use of copies for ideological and commercial motives. From the 1911 ‘enigmatic’ self-portrait styled after a photograph of Nietzsche, and the use of plaster casts and archaeological prints as sources of inspiration in his Metaphysical years – for example in Piazza with Ariadne (1913; no.19; Fig.62) – to the final obsessive variations on his early imagery, the modernist idea of the world as a ‘copy without original’ – which de Chirico originally derived from Nietzsche’s ambiguous relationship with metaphysics – was central to the artist’s role in avant-garde art, as well as to the continuity between the different phases of his work. This exhibition demonstrates that de Chirico never rejected his idea of what modern art should be: the reflection of a post-Nietzschean world lacking stable meaning. This is a world in which the most common, reassuring things have become estranged, allowing the artist to play with high and low registers, to mix cosmic and personal mythologies and to surprise with improbable combinations. De Chirico’s early figurative paintings were both traditionalist and highly original – an eclectic synthesis of German Symbolism and ancient and modern, literary and scenographic sources nurtured by the reading of Nietzsche – giving new possibilities to avant-garde painting and influencing the development of figurative art in the inter-War years in directions as different as the Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism. The results are often disquieting, at times even grotesque, as in the ambiguous gladiators of the late 1920s, a kitsch, homoerotic parody of the contemporary metamorphosis of classicism into the Fascist myths of Roman purity and virility.6 Whatever the initial impulse behind de Chirico’s self-inflicted iconoclasm,7 the artist maintained a seriously questioning attitude towards tradition. The number of self-portraits in the exhibition, for example Self portrait in red costume (1945; Fig.61), documents de Chirico’s constant testing of his artistic persona as the embodiment of a classical theory of painting or as a burlesque ‘court artist’ for the Fascist elite. Presenting an alternative to the conviction that an artist’s work is acceptable only up to a point, depending on his ideological affilia-
tions,8 this retrospective is revisionist in another, broader sense. It is not the first time that the MAMVP, whose collections champion the alternative modernism of the Ecole de Paris, proposes an alternative reading of modernism, confronting modernity with tradition. In 2003 the large Picabia retrospective at the same Museum re-evaluated the neglected late figurative production of that artist. The de Chirico exhibition shows that, as singulier as he might have been, Picabia was not an isolated case in the development of avant-garde aesthetics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Gerard Audinet’s catalogue essay, ‘Le lion et le rénard’, on the difficult relationship between Breton and de Chirico, shows that the latter’s move towards tradition should be considered as an attempt to protect artistic individuality against the political polarisation of representation in the late 1920s. In fact de Chirico’s entrance into the circle of Apollinaire – Breton’s role model as avantgarde Maecenas – demonstrates that the first generation of the Parisian avant-garde, which included Picasso as well as Derain, developed on the grounds of an ongoing dialogue with traditional figuration. Nonetheless, the place of de Chirico within this development remains difficult to assess. The beautifully designed exhibition catalogue intertwines a variety of interpretations with de Chirico’s own writings; yet the two remain somehow separate. Although a concentration on the extreme reactions to de Chirico’s work brings to light interesting new insights,9 the artist’s own voice tends to be silenced in the process. In general, insufficient weight is given to the interdependence of theory and practice in de Chirico’s art as well as to its philosophical sources, which are key to a better understanding of de Chirico’s relationship with the past. Awareness of the difference between de Chirico’s stylistic choices post-1919 and their later interpretations by other artists, critics, dealers and curators is often raised but only rarely engaged with to the full.10 This is especially true of the controversial relationship of de Chirico with the Surrealists, where it is important to separate the idea of
metaphysical revelation from the Surrealists’ ‘Marvellous’ (or oneiric unconscious) as two contiguous yet divergent processes: the former concerning the mediation between object and subject of representation, the latter being an interiorisation of the world that blurs the boundaries between the two. Although, in his early writings, de Chirico referred repeatedly to dreams in the Nietzschian sense of Apollonian vision11 and later invited the Surrealists to interpret his imagery as dreams, he always resisted the reduction of his pictorial enigmas to mere products of the unconscious. Thus, although the analysis of de Chirico’s imagery in relation to psychic regression is certainly legitimate, one wonders about the pertinence of this approach in advancing the understanding of his work. The same could be said of the exhibition title, where La fabrique à rêves would perhaps be more apt to describe the profound but largely misappropriated influence of de Chirico’s art. However, the exhibition is important for the future of de Chirico studies. The total makeover of the artist’s late works transforms his image from opportunistic to pre-Pop, simultaneously irreverent and rigorous, always engaging and modern. 1 Catalogue: Giorgio de Chirico. La fabrique des rêves. Edited by Fabrice Hergott et al. 359 pp. incl. 168 col. + 97 b. & w. ills. (Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2009), €40. ISBN 978–2–7596–0074–8. 2 W. Rubin, ed.: exh. cat. De Chirico, New York (Museum of Modern Art) and London (Tate Gallery) 1982; J. Clair and W. Schmied, eds.: exh. cat. De Chirico, Munich (Haus der Kunst) and Paris (Musée nationale d’art moderne Centre Georges Pompidou) 1982–83. 3 See in particular M. Fagiolo dell’Arco and P. Baldacci: Giorgio de Chirico, Parigi 1924–1929, Milan 1982. 4 A. Breton: Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris 1965 (1928), pp.26–34; A.H. Barr: exh. cat. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, New York (Museum of Modern Art) 1936–37; and J.T. Soby: Giorgio de Chirico, New York 1955. 5 M.T. Taylor, ed.: exh. cat. Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, Philadelphia (Museum of Art) 2002; M.T. Taylor and L. Melandri: exh. cat. Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico, Santa Monica (Museum of Art) 2006; and G. Roos and D. Schwartz: exh. cat. Giorgio de Chirico in Schweizer Sammlungen. Werke 1909–1971, Winterthur (Kunstmuseum) 2008. 6 See P. Baldacci: exh. cat. Giorgio de Chirico. Gladiatori, 1927–1929, Varese (Villa Panza) 2003. 7 Explored in the light of psychoanalysis by Caroline Thomson in ‘L’énigme de la régression chez Giorgio de Chirico’, in Hergott, op. cit. (note 1), pp.197–204. 8 See the foreword by F. Hergott in ibid., p.8. 9 See C. Derouet: ‘La fureur guerrière malgré J.T. Soby est entrée au musée’, ibid., pp.135–45; S. Krebs: ‘Chirico, “peintre de la decadence”?’, ibid., pp.148–52; and esp. E. Wetterwald: ‘Et si the late était too early? The late Chirico’, ibid., pp.243–50. 10 See E. Braun: ‘Théâtre d’ombres: Picasso et Chirico’, ibid., pp.67–79. On the influence of de Chirico on Picasso, see A. del Guercio: Parisien malgré lui. De Chirico, 1911–1915, Paris 1997, pp.52–99; M. Gale: ‘Ferrara. Città quadrata’, in Hergott, op. cit. (note 1), pp.37–44; and M.T. Taylor: ‘Variations sur une énigme: les “dernières” œuvres de Giorgio de Chirico et de Philip Guston’, ibid., pp.252–64. 11 See G. de Chirico: ‘Le sentiment de la préhistoire’ (1913), in G. Lista, ed.: L’Art métaphysique, Paris 1994, p.93.
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Jan Lievens Washington, Milwaukee and Amsterdam by ANNE T. WOOLLETT
testament to the perpetual momentum of Rembrandt studies that the artist’s stature has long cast a dampening pall over his closest contemporaries, notably his youthful friend and competitor, Jan Lievens (1607–74). A talented yet variable artist, Lievens enjoyed an extensive and successful career that brought him initial local recognition as well as, later on, court and civic commissions. Yet, apart from the thorny issues surrounding Lievens’s early association with his fellow Leidenaar, the bulk of his career remains little known, much less appreciated, by scholars and the public generally. In the stimulating exhibition Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, seen previously at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, and opening this month at the Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam (17th May to 9th August), the organisers Arthur K. Wheelock and Laurie Rivers simply and courageously present Lievens on his own terms, largely eschewing the metaphorical ‘shadow’ as a framework for the catalogue and the Washington and Amsterdam venues (while embracing it for the Milwaukee presentation, where the exhibition’s title was Out of Rembrandt’s Shadow: Jan Lievens).1 Rather, the enigmatic Lievens receives a revised and generous characterisation as ‘innovative’ and ‘daring’, an artist ‘whose boldness [. . .] rivaled Rembrandt’. Although not the first exhibition to strive to release Lievens from unhelpful comparisons to Rembrandt – the 1979 exhibition in Braunschweig, Jan Lievens: ein Maler im Schatten Rembrandts,2 assembled newly discovered and reattributed works IT IS A
alongside accepted paintings, drawings and prints and served as the basis for the present exhibition – the current show introduces the artist to a new generation of viewers and with the benefit of recent scholarship on his artistic circle in Leiden, his wider career and the work of leading artists in Utrecht. It effectively portrays Lievens as an artistic personality of impressive scope and perplexing unevenness who tenaciously pursued a refreshingly unusual career. Ascertaining the essential Lievens from the stylistically and qualitatively diverse array of paintings, drawings and prints assembled for the purpose is an elusive task for which the exhibition provides a rich and thought-provoking entrée. The show is Arthur Wheelock’s latest addition to the already impressive series of monographic exhibitions devoted to seventeenth-century Dutch artists that he has organised in collaboration with various institutions (Gerrit Dou in 2000; Aelbert Cuyp in 2001; Gerard ter Borch in 2004; and Frans van Mieris in 2006). Compared with these more predictable masters, the challenges of illuminating Lievens’s complex personality and stylistic versatility are unmistakable. In Washington, where this reviewer saw the exhibition, the paintings were handsomely installed, with the subject paintings in chronological order, while the tronies of c.1630 were separately grouped. Two galleries devoted to his graphic work, one exploring Lievens’s treatment of religious themes primarily in drawings and prints, and another dedicated chiefly to portrait and landscape drawings, were interposed to complete a total of seven galleries. The installation addressed all phases of Lievens’s peripatetic career, starting with the earliest independent works in Leiden, now placed in the early 1620s, before Rembrandt’s return to the city, despite the absence of dated works before the mid-1620s. The change later in Lievens’s
63. Allegory of the five senses, by Jan Lievens. c.1622. Panel, 78.2 by 124.4 cm. (Private collection; exh. Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam).
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64. Portrait of Adriaen Brouwer, by Jan Lievens. 1635–37. Black chalk, with touches of black ink, 22.1 by 18.5 cm. (Fritz Lugt Collection, Institut Néerlandais, Paris; exh. National Gallery of Art, Washington).
career to an elegant, Flemish-inspired style, is almost inconceivable at that point and must come as a surprise to many visitors. The exhibition and catalogue also covers his London sojourn (1632–35); Antwerp residency (1635–44); work in Amsterdam (from 1644), with periods spent in The Hague and Leiden and briefly Cleves (1664); and finally the last years in Amsterdam. In Washington, one occasionally wished for a stronger curatorial voice in the didactic texts to convey some of the critical context, particularly for the earliest works and reattributed paintings (for example, the previous attributions of the Evangelist Matthew and Evangelist John from the Historisches Museum, Bamberg, to Abraham Bloemaert and Jacob Backer), or to address Lievens’s frequent shifts in mode within a genre, for example in the beautiful and diverse group of tronies. In the well-illustrated catalogue, Wheelock’s opening essay provides a lucid account of Lievens’s career, acknowledging his shortcomings but arguing for a ‘new understanding [. . .] of [his] pictorial innovations and stylistic approach within the wider framework of Dutch art’. Notably, the balance of influence between Lievens and Rembrandt is redressed, with the former emerging as an innovator and initiator of stylistic trends, such as a more textured application of paint that heralds Rembrandt’s ‘rough manner’, varied scratching into wet paint, and move towards a more tonal palette. The exhibited early works support the notion that Lievens’s earliest paintings should be dated to the early 1620s, in closer correspondence with the innovations of Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen in Utrecht. The assessment of the patronage for the artist’s history paintings and portraits in the last three decades of his career (1644–74) by Jaap van der Veen is particularly welcome, while Lievens’s graphic work, a fascinating
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aspect of the exhibition, is informatively discussed in essays by Stephanie Dickey and Gregory Rubenstein. The perplexing issue of technique and its relationship to different styles receives insightful treatment by Melanie Gifford; Lievens worked in different styles simultaneously and achieved pictorial effects largely through manipulation of the surface layers of paint, without attempting to replicate the techniques he sought to emulate. The promised opportunity to reassess Lievens’s artistic contribution is amply fulfilled, since the organisers have not restricted their selection to the most familiar or attractive aspects of the artist’s long career. The viewer is sustained throughout by evidence of Lievens’s driving ambition and the directness with which he revealed his artistic influences. Both aspects are clear from the astonishing group of disparate paintings (nos.1–5 and 11) at the beginning of the exhibition that introduce an ambitious and youthfully indiscreet artist through surprising juxtapositions. The brash, even sloppy brushwork and pentimenti in the costumes of the Allegory of the five senses (no.2; Fig.63) attest to the young artist’s impetuous nature and interest in painterly effects. Lievens’s large-scale figures are quite unlike those of his teacher, Lastman, and, along with the rich palette and buoyant subject of the slightly later Youth embracing a young woman (private collection; no.12), reflect the influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti. But Lievens took Caravaggism in a different direction, as is demonstrated by works such as St Peter released from prison (private collection, Israel; no.5) and Still life with books (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; no.11). The series of the Four Elements (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel) and two canvases from a series of the Five Senses, Allegory of Sight and Allegory of Smell (both National Museum, Warsaw), were regrettably not included. Nine works in the exhibition were in the past attributed to Rembrandt (nos.4, 6, 11, 21, 24, 26, 27, 31 and 47). The restitution of works to Lievens was not accentuated in Washington, but even the most familiar corrections, such as The feast of Ester (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; no.6) are worth reiterating and should have been noted in the relevant catalogue entry. Rembrandt’s lively presence in Leiden may be discerned from the various likenesses that appear in early works. The smiling figure in the centre of The cardplayers (private collection; no.3) may well be the earliest-known depiction of Lievens’s friend, as Wheelock proposes. His features seem to have served as inspiration for other figures as well, such as the young man with a pitcher in Pilate washing his hands (Lakenhal, Leiden; no.7), and as the subject of the Lute player (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; no.13). An early respondent to Anthony van Dyck’s elegant style, Lievens embraced a more courtly and expressive manner on his move to London in 1632. Later, he became wholly engrossed in Antwerp artistic life after going to live in the city in 1635. While the moving
sobriety of works such as The lamentation of Christ (modello, Charles Roelofs, Amsterdam, and Alte Pinakothek, Munich; nos.39 and 40) is obviously indebted to Van Dyck’s 1636 Lamentation (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp), small works such as Fighting cardplayers and Death (private collection; no.36) find Lievens in the company of genre painters, notably Joos van Craesbeeck and Adriaen Brouwer. Lievens’s engagement with different modes in Antwerp is perhaps most eloquently expressed in his lively Portrait of Adriaen Brouwer (no.102; Fig.64), only shown in Washington, in which he both emulates and slightly mocks Van Dyck’s style and courtly manner. The possibility that Lievens saw the festive decoration of the city of Antwerp for the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi after the entry itself on 17th April 1635 seems likely on the basis of his drawings of river gods (National Gallery of Art, Washington, and private collection [not in exhibition]; nos.104 and 105), which show common allegorical elements in Antwerp triumphal entries that featured prominently in the Stage of Welcome. Lievens’s late career in Amsterdam and The Hague is perhaps the least familiar phase of his output. The organisers are to be commended for suggesting the range and ambition of his large-scale civic works through oil-sketches and notable examples such as the Triumph of Peace (no.49; Fig.65). Many paintings, such as Quintus Fabius Maximus and his son (Royal Palace, Amsterdam) remain in situ or have been destroyed. The Mars and Venus (Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten, BerlinBrandenburg; no.50), lent only to the Rem-
brandthuis, will no doubt serve as a highlight of the closing venue. These late works have long been among the most difficult to enjoy, as they uneasily mix the painterly effects of Titian, Rubensian grandeur and Van Dyckian delicacy. However, the luminous Self-portrait (National Gallery, London; no.48) and Portrait of Adriaen Trip (Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, on loan from a private collection; no.44) serve to remind us that Lievens’s Flemish style was very successful with patrons, even though it challenges us to confront the reasons for its general lack of appeal to modern sensibilities. Among the highlights of the exhibition are several recently discovered works, many now in private hands, notably Gideon’s sacrifice (private collection; no.47) and St Peter released from prison (private collection, Israel; no.5), a damaged painting previously cut into a dozen large pieces which was restored for the exhibition. Paintings to have emerged recently are found especially among the tronies, one of the most impressive and coherent groups on view. Demonstrating Lievens’s versatility, they range from the golden tonalities and thin application of Profile head of an old woman (‘Rembrandt’s mother’) (Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston; no.21) to the moving portrayal of old age (no.20; Fig.66) and the brilliant evocation of youth in Boy in a cape and turban (private collection; no.30). The latter, tentatively identified as Prince Charles Louis, bears little resemblance to the likeness of the prince in the double-portrait of Prince Charles Louis with his tutor, as the young Alexander instructed by Aristotle (J. Paul Getty 65. Triumph of Peace, by Jan Lievens. 1652. Canvas, 220 by 204 cm. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; exh. Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam).
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Giacometti and Egypt Berlin and Zürich by ROGER CARDINAL
66. Bearded man with a beret, by Jan Lievens. c.1630. Panel, 53.5 by 46.3 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington; exh. Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam).
Museum, Los Angeles; no.29) and more probably portrays an unknown youthful model in Persian costume. Old man holding a skull (Johnny Van Haeften Ltd., London; no.22) is a marvellously engaging treatment of a traditional subject. The same model appears in the Tric trac players,3 and it may be that the London panel should be dated slightly earlier. These smaller studies provide a surprising contrast to the well-known Man in oriental costume (‘Sultan Soliman’) (Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten, BerlinBrandenburg; no.19). Despite its imposing size and striking palette, it lacks the presence and intensity of the smaller character studies and exemplifies the artist’s predilection for superficial effects. Lievens was, all in all, an inconsistent artist, and it is difficult to see his output as equal in overall quality to other leading contemporaries. Willing to modify his style to a patron’s preferences, he indefatigably pursued wealth and fame. Yet, while his ambitions seem to have adversely affected the perception of his contribution to Dutch art, it is to be hoped that through this exhibition his achievements will be more readily acknowledged and that outstanding examples of his artistic vision in history painting and portraiture will be integrated into thematic exhibitions from which they have often been excluded. 1 Catalogue: Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered. By Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr, with contributions by Stephanie S. Dickey, E. Melanie Gifford, Gregory Rubinstein, Jaap van der Veen and Lloyd DeWitt. 320 pp. incl. 250 col. + 40 b. & w. ills. (National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), $65. ISBN 978–0–300–14213–6. 2 Organised by Rüdiger Klessmann and Sabine Jacob; reviewed in this Magazine, 121 (1979), pp.741–46. 3 Reproduced in Wheelock et al., op. cit. (note 1), p.86, fig.2.
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ALTHOUGH ALBERTO GIACOMETTI achieved fame with one of modern art’s most radical and unmistakable styles, it is also the case that he learned a good deal from the arts of the past. A tenacious draughtsman, he never visited a museum without his sketch-pad, and he was a shameless scribbler in the margins of art books.1 Having first discovered the Egyptians at the Museo Archeologico in Florence in 1920, he maintained a lifelong interest in their ancient masterpieces, typically sketching them in the Louvre on Sundays. The exhibition Giacometti, der Ägypter seeks to highlight the impact of the sculptors of Ancient Egypt upon a supreme modernist. Shown first at the Egyptian Museum, Berlin, before moving to the Kunsthaus Zürich (to 24th May), the show was devised by the respective museum directors, the Egyptologist Dietrich Wildung and the art historian Christian Klemm, also conservator of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zürich. It propounds a persistent thesis by setting Giacometti’s drawings alongside Egyptian objects, as well as juxtaposing select sculptures from either source, emphasising formal similarities while hinting at the less palpable sense of solidarity which the modern sculptor felt with anonymous forebears whom he envisaged as creative individuals. The first version of the exhibition was shown in the sober context of Berlin’s Altes Museum,2 where works by Giacometti were interpolated among the ancient artefacts. Their impact was somewhat tempered, given that only about nine of Giacometti’s sculptures were to be seen within the main hall, which housed upwards of fifty Egyptian pieces, including the portrait-statue of Amenemhet III (c.1820 BC), a massive figure in resplendent black granite. One striking juxtaposition saw Giacometti’s relatively small bronze bust Eli Lotar I (1965) paired with a spectacular archaeological relic, the brokenoff nose and lips from a colossal statue of the Pharaoh Akhenaten (c.1350 BC), lent by the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst in Munich. Giacometti’s renowned haggard or jagged manner seemed a fitting response to the ravaged magnificence of this fragment. Both works were installed on tall, narrow plinths within display-boxes of transparent perspex. This alerted the viewer to a general parallel between the Egyptian sculptors’ commitment to massive, cuboid blocks with square bases and the Swiss master’s penchant for presenting his wildly thumbed post-War figures inside cuboid cages (as in La cage; 1951) or upon brick-like plinths of abnormal bulk (as in Figurine sur grand socle; 1952). In this respect, one might see Giacometti instinctively bolstering up his figures in emulation of the concision and monumental density of the Egyptian paradigm.
A book on ancient art, once owned by Giacometti, was on display, opened at an illustration of a carving of the young prince Perhernofret (c.2600 BC; Fig.67). In the right-hand margin, Giacometti made a fairly accurate pencil copy, but then added a radically transformed image on the left, a hastily scrawled yet readily identifiable depiction of his famous bronze Homme qui marche (1947). Shown nearby, the original painted wood figure typifies the standard Egyptian ‘standing-and-walking’ pose which prefigures that of the ancient Greek kouros. While the prince’s right side remains static and strictly erect, with arms taut and fists clenched, the left leg has begun to inch forwards and the hunched shoulders to twist slightly. As for the Giacometti bronze, also shown nearby, its arms are similarly stiff, although the skinniness of its limbs and the boldness of its stride belong to another moment in the narrative, as if the modernist were impatient to escape the hesitancy of the archaic pose. It should be noted that Giacometti’s Femme qui marche II (1936) – unfortunately not present at either venue – mimics such demure Egyptian female figures as the standing-andwalking Nehi (c.1250 BC), found at Memphis. This slim, toy-like wood figure has her long left foot gliding ever so slightly forwards, as if gingerly to tread the surface before her, which is covered in hieroglyphs. When Giacometti made a marginal sketch of Nehi in another book, she became at once taller and more slender, as if adjusting to the modernist’s ultimate vision of the skeletal sublime. The pride of the Egyptian Museum since its acquisition in 1920 is the superb bust of Queen Nefertiti, consort of Akhenaten (c.1338 BC). With its smooth plaster finish, long pale neck and colourful ornamentation, it resided aloof and serene in its own space. Two portrait-busts of Giacometti’s wife,
67. Undated marginalia, by Alberto Giacometti, in L. Curtius: Aegypten und Vorderasien, Berlin 1923. (Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, Kunsthaus Zürich).
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68. Page of drawings of Akhenaten, by Alberto Giacometti. c.1921. Pencil, 29.9 by 38.4 cm. (Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris; exh. Kunsthaus Zürich).
Annette VI and VIII (both of 1962), were set a little distance away. Both are of unevenly textured bronze and painted an unlovely ochre, and neither has pretensions to serenity, let alone beauty: if anything, they look defeated, sullen and quite out of sorts. One could not but feel that any alleged resemblance or affinity here was not working. It needed a badly damaged bust of Akhenaten to suggest the link to Giacometti’s late aesthetic of the ruinous-craggy. One thing is well attested, however, namely that Giacometti’s writings do frequently invoke the Egyptian example. In a 1962 interview with André Parinaud, he even toys with the paradox whereby archaic stylisation can be more conducive to a sensation of the real than accurate reproduction.3 The paradox fits nicely in many instances, although it has to be said that Giacometti’s admiration of Egyptian stylisation does not preclude a susceptibility to accurate individualistic representation. The many busts in plaster or stone arrayed in the Egyptian Museum date from later periods and mark a growing concern with personal rather than conventionalised features. The telling example was the socalled Green head (a late work dating to c.400 BC), an electrifying masterpiece of mimetic precision and a convincing individual portrait, its cruel expression suggesting a torturer or executioner. Once installed in Zürich, the exhibition seems to have adopted a more assured tone, drawing amply on the local collection while ushering in some eighteen archaic pieces from Berlin with no sense of their being there on sufferance. The squat granite sculpture
known as The scribe Dersenedj (c.2500 BC) inspired several sketches by Giacometti, although his most striking drawing – a selfportrait (c.1934) naked, cross-legged and working at a sketch-pad – was not available for loan and appears only as a catalogue illustration (p.83). A fine head of Akhenaten from the Armana excavations (1340 BC) is mounted in a perspex cube. It seemingly inspired a page of agile drawings by Giacometti (Fig.68), although certain variant details, such as the disappearance of the original’s deep creases between nose and mouth, and the addition of regal headgear, make it more likely that he copied this in the Louvre. Even so, the point is undoubtedly made that Giacometti felt a strong attraction to this ancient head, as if fascinated by the authority of a Pharaoh who had declared himself the direct representative of the solar god Aten. The statue of Senenmut (Fig.69) shows the court architect holding a baby princess in his lap. Engulfed within a massive granite cube, the figure is of a piece with its deep plinth and wears a mantle of hieroglyphs, as if the entire body were tattooed. Whereas Giacometti’s enigmatic thirteen-sided Cube (Fig.70) came across in Berlin as something of a fluke archaeological remnant, its placement and attached description in Zürich argue for its being a key work in Giacometti’s development. The bronze bears a scratched face on its topmost facet, reminding us that the artist was aware of its metaphoric versatility as imposing geometric shape, symbolic personage and potent talisman. Possibilities for comparison lurk everywhere here. At its most obvious and,
arguably, most banal, that curious work Le chariot (1950), in which a female figure teeters upon a giant chariot, can be seen as a straightforward reminiscence of the Egyptian warchariot (c.1500 BC) which Giacometti is thought to have seen in Florence thirty years before.4 Large feet and deep, solid plinths are undoubtedly features common to the two sorts of sculpture, while one is encouraged to divine the shaping rigour of Egyptian symmetry and frontality implied in the Swiss artist’s late monumental figures. More subtle are the drawings in the central room of the Giacometti suite at the Kunsthaus, which bear witness to his tireless affection for Egyptian forms. They include sketches done in Florence as early as 1920 as well as the bold ink drawings entitled The garden of Ipy (1942), inspired by a reproduction in a book on Egyptian painting. Here is laid bare the true nature of Giacometti’s copying strategy, there being a palpable shift from mechanical transcription to an invigorating transfiguration. That is, the modernist takes full possession of the original and produces a fresh, transcendent entity, still faithful to the principle of ‘family resemblance’ yet manifestly sui generis.5 The final room contains the great Akhenaten fragment as well as the Green head. The latter is flanked on either side, and a few feet behind, by two of Giacometti’s last sculptures, the seated Eli Lotar II (1965) and the kneeling Eli Lotar III (1965). Each mimes a standard Egyptian pose, yet each is thin-nosed and has a torso squeezed thinner by far than any ancient antecedent. Giacometti, der Ägypter is certainly exciting, and its argument thought-provoking, if sometimes brittle. Some may find it far-fetched that its curators should celebrate the artist as ‘Giacometti the Egyptian’, given that there were
69. Statue of Senenmut. Egypt, c.1470 BC. Granite, 100.5 cm. high. (Ägyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; exh. Kunsthaus Zürich). the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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Futurism Milan and Rovereto by CHRIS MICHAELIDES
the birth of Futurism, which is reckoned to have begun with the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto in 1909, is being marked in Italy with numerous exhibitions, events, publications and museum openings.1 Futurism, which rejected the inheritance of the past and embraced modernity, machines and speed, was one of the most energetic and vital literary and artistic avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. It was also one of the longest, as it continued until 1944, the year of Marinetti’s death. Surveys of the movement tend either to concentrate on the early ‘heroic’ years that ended in 1916 with the deaths of Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia and the defection of some of its other key players or attempt to cover its entire thirtyfive-year span. This year’s exhibitions in Milan and Rovereto include both tendencies. Futurismo 1909–2009. Velocità + Arte + Azione, at the Palazzo Reale, Milan (to 7th June), examines the evolution of the movement, in all its diverse manifestations and transformations, from its inception in 1909 to 1944, and looks also at its origins and influence. With some five hundred works by eighty artists, it is a huge survey which, in its clarity and thoroughness, its intelligent hanging and the beauty of its exhibits, lays claim to be the most important exhibition of this centenary year. As befits a movement that aimed at a ‘Futurist reconstruction of the Universe’, the exhibition covers not only painting and sculpture but also architectural design, photography, graphic art, music, theatre, cinema, ceramics and fashion design. In a beautiful, if occasionally overcrowded THE CENTENARY OF
70. Cube, by Alberto Giacometti. 1933–34. Bronze, 94 by 54 by 59 cm. (Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, Kunsthaus Zürich).
surely many other factors in play, notably African and Oceanic tribal art,6 not to mention the work of contemporaries such as Brancusi and Laurens, nor again the artist’s private exposure to hazards and coincidences, such as the 1938 traffic accident which injured his right foot (Klemm points out that this took place on the Place des Pyramides). What is more, Giacometti never travelled to Egypt, nor ever visited the Berlin collections, and this somewhat muffles the plausibility of the demonstration. All the same, judicious choices from the Berlin holdings do often duplicate works from the Louvre, ensuring a reasonably sound ‘fit’. More significantly, the essays in the catalogue establish a corpus of cumulative evidence that will extend and enhance scholarly debate on the topic of ‘creative copying’.7 1 See M. Casanova, ed.: exh. cat. Alberto Giacometti: Dialogue with the History of Art, Valencia (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern) 2001; and C. Braschi: ‘Dessiner: Le cas des “copies du passé”’, in V. Wiesinger, ed.: L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, Paris 2007, pp.222–53. 2 The collections of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum – initiated in grander times – have led a troubled life since the 1940s, when they were removed for safekeeping to the Dahlem and Charlottenburg museums. In 2005 they were at last returned to central Berlin for display in the Altes Museum on the Museumsinsel. Having closed down in February 2009, following the Giacometti show, the Egyptian Museum is now expected to reopen in October 2009 within the nearby, recently restored Neues Museum. 3 See A. Giacometti: Ecrits, Paris 1990, p.273. 4 See J. Lord: Giacometti. A Biography, London 1986, p.42. 5 M. Bärmann offers a perspicacious appraisal of Giacometti’s transformative copying in ‘Das Eigene im Anderen’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (3rd–4th January 2001), p.65. 6 See, for instance, R. Krauss: ‘Giacometti’, in W. Rubin, ed.: ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York 1984, pp.502–33. 7 Catalogue: Giacometti, der Ägypter. Essays by Christian Klemm and Dietrich Wildung. 104 pp. incl. 110 b. & w. ills. (Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich and Berlin, 2008), €19.90; SWF 28. ISBN 978–3–422–06861–2 (German language only).
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71. The railway, by Luigi Russolo. 1910. Canvas, 76.5 by 61.5 cm. (Private collection, Erba; exh. Palazzo Reale, Milan).
display, each of the exhibition’s fifteen sections has its own colour scheme and is introduced by panels massively bolted to the wall, a reference to Fortunato Depero’s ‘bolted book’. The exhibition begins with an examination of the movement’s literary and aesthetic roots in fin-de-siècle Symbolist and Divisionist art in Lombardy, and a display of the pre-1910 output of Giacomo Balla, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, that covers the same ground (and shows some of the same works) as last year’s Radical light exhibition in London and Zürich2 but adds the graphic art of Alberto Martini and Romolo Romani, both contributors to Marinetti’s review Poesia, and the sculpture of Medardo Rosso. The pre-War years of Futurism are divided across several galleries devoted to the ‘Milanese’ triumvirate (Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo), Severini in Paris and sculpture. Some of the best-known works of early Futurism, especially the ones included in the 1912 Futurist exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, were unavailable,3 but the selectors have managed on the other hand to secure important loans from private collections (Carrà’s Milan Station; 1910–11; cat. no.III.50 and Russolo’s The railway; no.III.85; Fig.71) and, thanks to the failure of the long-awaited Museo del Novecento to open on time for the Futurist celebrations,4 loans from the Civic Art Collections in Milan such as Boccioni’s first, and more expressive, version of the triptych States of mind (1911; no.III.22) and Carrà’s The red rider (no.III.57; Fig.72). The continuing vitality of Futurism in the 1920s is demonstrated with remarkable groups of works by Depero and Balla, and in the 1930s by an impressive sequence of aeropainting (Fig.73), and ‘cosmic idealism’ paintings. Enrico Prampolini emerges as a leading figure in the second half of the exhibition, where his versatility and breadth of output can be seen in works ranging from his early Futurist experiments between 1913 and 1919 to his stage designs, his aeropainting, and his use of mixed media and non-art objects (his polimaterismo). Prampolini’s output naturally leads on to the work of Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio and Mario Schifano showing that Futurism never ceased to exert an influence on Italian artists even at a time when its reputation was in the doldrums. The exhibition includes extensive displays of ceramics, photography, fashion and stage design and films such as Arrigo Frusta’s La storia di Lulù (Turin; 1909–10) in which only the feet of the characters are shown. Particularly successful among the subsidiary displays is the recreation of Balla’s sets and light effects for Stravinsky’s short curtainraiser Feu d’artifice, commissioned during the 1916 visit to Rome of the Ballets Russes. It is churlish to point out omissions or inconsistencies in such an overwhelmingly rich exhibition, but surely the composers Francesco Balilla Pratella and Alfredo Casella should have been represented, and Russolo’s reconstructed intonarumori should be heard,
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72. The red rider, by Carlo Carrà. 1913. Tempera and ink on paper on canvas, 26 by 36 cm. (Civiche raccolte d’arte, Museo del Novecento, Milan; exh. Palazzo Reale, Milan).
not just seen. The absence of Thayaht, the creator of the tuta (a Futurist boiler-suit), from the fashion section also seems strange. The architectural design section is limited to the 1910s (Sant’Elia and Virgilio Marchi but no Mario Chiattone despite his presence in the catalogue), as the later period is to be treated in an exhibition at the Triennale di Milano, promised for later this year. The display of printed books is essentially limited to ‘book-objects’ like the two ‘tin books’, and Depero futurista (the ‘bolted book’), rather than more conventional books. There is, however, an impressive array of ‘words-in-freedom’ manuscripts. The lavishly produced catalogue contains sixteen introductory essays followed by high quality colour reproductions of all the exhibits. It is a pity, though, that instead of producing a second volume, the detailed catalogue entries, chronology and bibliography (a total of 271 pages of text) have been relegated to an accompanying CD Rom.5 Milan, where Marinetti was based until 1925, is appropriately also celebrating the anniversary of Futurism with a second exhibition dedicated to the movement’s creator and indefatigable promoter across Europe, a man whose incessant energy earned him the nickname ‘caffeina d’Europa’. F.T. Marinetti = Futurismo, at the Fondazione Stelline, Milan (to 7th June), includes numerous portraits of Marinetti, notably Depero’s Marinetti, a patriotic storm (1924) and Prampolini’s Portrait of the poet Marinetti in the Gulf of Spezia (1933–34; Fig.74), printed books, manifestos and several ‘words-in-freedom’ (one of the most important innovations of Futurist style, a visual poem employing verbal and visual devices) by Marinetti, Carrà, Fedele Azari and Francesco and Pasqualino Cangiullo.
The accompanying catalogue includes a long and lucid overview of Marinetti’s life, politics and contribution to Futurism, as well as essays on the pre-Futurist literary works he wrote in French, his Futurist manifestos, his relationship to D’Annunzio, his role in the creation of Modernism in England, and the reception of Futurism in Japan. It also lists and reproduces all known ‘words-in-freedom’ by Marinetti.6 Illuminazioni. Avanguardie a confronto. Italia, Germania, Russia at Mart Rovereto (to 7th June) is the first of three exhibitions this year curated by Ester Coen with the umbrella title Futurismo 100, which will examine the relationship between Futurism and other avant-garde movements in Europe between 1900 and 1920.7 The present exhibition attempts to show the impact of Futurism in Germany and Russia. There are 143 works on view, including eighty-five oil paintings shown in a main sequence of ten galleries. Each of these has been given a rather arbitrary, mostly abstract name (‘Rhythms’, ‘Dynamisms’, ‘Perspectives’, ‘Chromatisms’, ‘Assonances’); in most of the sections a single Futurist painting is featured in the company of German and Russian works (Cubist, CuboFuturist, Expressionist, Dadaist or Rayonist) with which it is supposed to have some relation, stylistic or thematic. Two of the galleries, however, lack any Futurist works, and, despite the title of the exhibition, the display also includes several French works. This approach is occasionally effective, as in the juxtaposition of Severini’s The bear dance at the Moulin Rouge (1913; Centre Pompidou, Paris; cat. no.37) with Rayonist works by Mikhail Larionov, Aleksandr Shevchenko and Olga Rozanova, or that of city scenes by Severini, Carrà, Rozanova, Alexandra Exter and Pavel Filonov. Elsewhere the works are virtually
interchangeable, and the chronological span is too wide for comparisons to be meaningful (the Filonov works, for example, date from the 1920s). The overall effect is that of a general display of early twentieth-century avantgarde paintings with no discernible thread, in which the Italian Futurists are outnumbered and somewhat overshadowed by their often spectacular neighbours. Thankfully, tucked away in two galleries towards the end of the show, there is a more factual and less impressionistic display of smaller works, prints and drawings which, with the help of archival material drawn from Mart’s Archivio del Novecento,8 clarifies the relationship of the Futurists with the French, German and Russian avant-garde. The same approach is also used in the hefty catalogue9 which, instead of separate catalogue entries, contains a rich selection of texts from published and archival sources (memoirs, letters, etc.); these provide vivid first-hand accounts of the pre-1914 art scene in Europe and of the relationships then existing between the Futurists and avant-garde circles in Berlin, Moscow and New York and also the ‘on-off’ relationship between the ‘marinettisti’ and the Lacerba group in Florence. Only London is, inexplicably, left out. Mart has, additionally, published a monograph by Vladimir Pavlovi˘c Lap´sin about Marinetti’s journey to Russia in 1914 detailing the circumstances of this visit, the reactions to it and its aftermath, and describing more generally Italo-Russian literary and artistic relations on the eve of the First World War.10 The exhibition includes no works by Depero, Rovereto’s artistic genius loci, but the Casa d’arte futurista Fortunato Depero, Rovereto, has reopened, after a ten-year closure, in time for the celebrations of Futurism.11
73. Vite orizzontale (Wing-over), by Tullio Crali. 1938. Oil on plywood, 80 by 60 cm. (Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; exh. Palazzo Reale, Milan). the burlin g t o n m a g a z i n e
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74. Portrait of the poet Marinetti in the Gulf of Spezia, by Enrico Prampolini. 1933–34. Oil on board, 82 by 73 cm. (Private collection; exh. Fondazione Stelline, Milan).
The first Casa Depero was opened in 1919 to make tapestries, toys and furniture based on the artist’s designs; after years of protracted negotiations with the local authorities and just a few months before the artist’s death, a museum of Depero’s work opened in 1959 in its present location. Since 1989 it has been managed by Mart, which also owns the Depero’s collections and archives. This is the only Futurist artist’s house in Italy, and its success highlights the sad state of the Casa Balla in Rome which, since the death of the artist’s two daughters in the 1980s, has remained inaccessible and the fate of its contents uncertain. That house too should surely pass into public ownership or perhaps, like Francis Bacon’s studio, be dismantled and reassembled in an appropriate museum.
(Federico Motta, Milan, 2008), €135. ISBN 978–88–7179–585–0; and Futurismo: la rivolta dell’avanguardia = die Revolte der Avantgarde. By Giovanni Lista. 751 pp. incl. 245 col. + numerous b. & w. ills. (Fondazione VAF, Silvana, Milan, 2008), €50. ISBN 978–88–366–1103–4. 6 Catalogue: F.T. Marinetti = Futurismo. Edited by Luigi Sansone. 333 pp. incl. 224 col. + 52 b. & w. ills. (Federico Motta Editore, Milan, 2009), €49. ISBN 978–88–7179–608–6. 7 The other two will be Astrazioni, at the Museo Correr, Venice (5th June to 4th October), and Simultaneità, at Palazzo Reale, Milan (15th October to 25th January 2010). 8 See Guida all’Archivio del ’900. Biblioteca e fondi archivistici, Milan 2003. The Museum has also published catalogues of individual archives, such as M. Duci: Fondo Tullio Crali. Inventario, Rovereto 2008; F. Velardita: Fondo Fortunato Depero. Inventario, Rovereto 2008; and M. Duci: Fondo Thayaht. Inventario, Rovereto 2006. 9 Catalogue: Futurismo 100. Illuminazioni. Avanguardie a confronto. Italia, Germania, Russia. By Ester Coen. 520 pp. incl. 225 col. + 56 b. & w. ills. (Mart/Electa, Milan, 2009), €75 (HB). ISBN 978–88–370–6777–9. 10 Marinetti e la Russia: dalla storia delle relazioni italo-russe nel ventesimo secolo. By Vladimir Pavlovi˘c Lap´sin. 288 pp. incl. 27 b. & w. ills. (Mart Inediti, Milan, 2008), €30 (HB). ISBN 978–88–6130–915–9. 11 Guide: Casa d’arte futurista Fortunato Depero. Edited by Nicoletta Boschiero. 103 pp. incl. 50 col. + 36 b. & w. ills. (Mart, Rovereto, 2009).
Brücke New York by ROBIN REISENFELD
of prominent exhibitions on the Brücke have recently been held in Europe upon the occasion of the group’s one-hundredth anniversary, this has not been the situation in the United States. Surprisingly, Brücke. The Birth of Expressionism in Berlin and Dresden, 1905–1913 at the Neue Galerie, New York (to 29th June), marks the first comprehensive exhibition in the US to focus upon this artists’ collective and its distinctive contribution to the formation of early twentieth-century Modernism.1 Audiences new to the Brücke will not be disappointed by the Neue Galerie’s cheek-byjowl installation of fifty paintings, fifty-three prints and works on paper and four wood sculptures. Included are major examples by the core artists Erich Heckel, Ernst L. Kirchner, Max Pechstein and Karl SchmidtRottluff that are still fresh and have the power to astonish. The collective presentation provides the viewer with a rare opportunity to gauge how the group’s adherence to communal living and a collaborative working process facilitated their ultimate objective to push German art into the twentieth century. No doubt due to problems with loans, two of the peripheral members, Emil Nolde (a crucial member briefly from 1906–07) and Otto Mueller (who joined the group in 1911 upon its move to Berlin), are, with only two prints,
ALTHOUGH A NUMBER 1
It should be remembered that the first Futurist manifesto launched Futurism as a literary movement but with the publication of the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi on 11th February 1910, it embraced the visual arts and, subsequently, other forms of artistic expression. 2 Reviewed by Martin Hopkinson in this Magazine, 150 (2008), pp.700–01. 3 These works formed the core of Le Futurisme à Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, last autumn. In an attempt to lessen what in Italy was seen as a French bias in the hanging of that exhibition, its focus on the Bernheim-Jeune 1912 exhibition has been removed in Futurismo: avanguardia-avanguardie, the smaller, and much-altered version of the exhibition, now at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome (to 24th May). Catalogue: Le Futurisme à Paris: une avant-garde explosive. Edited by Didier Ottinger, Ester Coen and Matthew Gale. 359 pp. incl. 169 col. + 68 b. & w. ills. (Centre Pompidou, Paris, and 5 Continents, Milan, 2008), €39.90. ISBN 978–28–44–26359–9; 978–88–7439–497–5 (Italian version). 4 The Museum is now planned to open in 2010 and is to be housed in the Palazzo dell’Arengario, Milan, currently under renovation, in Piazza del Duomo and adjacent to the Palazzo Reale. 5 Catalogue: Futurismo 1909–2009. Velocità + Arte + Azione. By Giovanni Lista and Ada Masoero. 452 pp. incl. 533 col. + 71 b. & w. ills. + CD Rom. (Skira, Milan, 2009), €50. ISBN 978–88–5720–039–2. See also two recently published monumental monographs which examine the entire period: Il Futurismo. By Fabio Benzi. 380 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills.
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under-represented. Nevertheless, the works on show, although squeezed into three mid-sized galleries and a narrow hall corridor and mounted against walls painted lavender, yellow and green, go a long way in conveying the artists’ feverish quest to invent a visual equivalent to the powerful societal and cultural transformations occurring within jahrhundertwende Germany. The exhibition introduces the work according to three familiar themes: the experience of nature, the communal studio and urban transformation. In addition, a second-floor gallery displays a wonderful selection of, mostly, prints and other works on paper to illustrate the group’s sustained dedication to printmaking and its attendant investigation of new technical processes. In this compressed version of the Brücke’s history, the exhibition devotes itself to those objects made from 1909 onwards, with scant attention paid to its earlier development or the role of each individual member. The four annual print portfolios produced between 1909 and 1912 line the corridor walls leading to the painting galleries; otherwise the decision to segregate the prints and other works on paper from the paintings seems at odds with the group’s roots in Jugendstil artsand-craft principles and their emphasis upon the integration of art and life. Structurally as well, they relied heavily upon drawings and prints as a means to work through a number of recent French, historic German and primitivist influences in order to arrive at their signature collective style. Separated out as they are, the prints exemplify the group’s inventiveness and Brücke’s pre-eminent role in the revitalisation of printmaking as a fine art form at that time. Together they illustrate the interactive dynamic between the members and the heightened response to their surroundings, especially the dance halls and cafés that they frequented. In the section on nature, many of the canvases depicting Dresden’s environs, including
75. Marzella, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. 1909–10. Canvas, 76 by 60 cm. (Moderna Museet, Stockholm; exh. Neue Galerie, New York).
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Heckel’s Blustery landscape near Dresden (1910), Schmidt-Rottluff’s River landscape with bridge and train (1905) and Pechstein’s March snow I (1908) uphold the observation of the curator and scholar Reinhold Heller that the artists presented a domesticated view of nature perceived largely through the lens of their urban existence. However, this assertion becomes less evident in the paintings made after the group’s assimilation of primitivism’s societal attitudes and its challenge to Western painting’s conventions of spatial organisation and perspective. In Pechstein’s Beach at Nidden (1911) and Kirchner’s Fehmarn coast (1912) the artists make the rugged and inhospitable Baltic coast their focus and abandon their earlier touristic attitude for one that affirms a psychological identification with the natural order. This is particularly the case in Kirchner’s haunting, bird’s-eye view of The lighthouse of Fehmarn (1912) where his lighthouse functions as a totemic structure embedded within a visionary universe constructed from an interlocking set of stacked, scalloped natural shapes and geometric architectural forms. The section devoted to the communal studio gathers key works that exemplify the group’s eventual adoption of the adolescent female nude as a visual metaphor for their own creative energy. Most effective is the juxtaposition between Kirchner’s and Heckel’s five depictions of their favourite elfin-like model Fränzi in comparison to Pechstein’s more fleshy, and Gauguin-inspired portraits such as Nelly (1910) and Fruit bowl (1910). All three artists adopt a pungent palette of hot pinks, mustard yellows, tropical orange-reds and greens and rely upon contour to signify their rejection of academic attitudes towards the nude. But the exhibition’s selection highlights the manner in which Kirchner and Heckel evolved their style. Not only do they reject modelling and anatomical precision but transgress academic practice by introducing a backdrop that conveys the normally unacceptable spatial intimacy between model and artist within their shared bohemian quarters. Indeed, their portrayal of Fränzi exemplifies one of the first sustained visual examinations of adolescent sexuality (along with works by Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele) and chronologically corresponds to its late nineteenth-century scientific categorisation as a stage of human psychological and physiological development.2 Although the representation of adolescence appears in Symbolist turn-of-the-century literature and art, exemplified perhaps most famously by Edvard Munch’s Puberty (1894) and Elena LukschMakowsky Adolescentia (1903), the Fränzi depictions characterise the concept in an unprecedented manner. Here the Expressionist artists merge the physical characteristics of female adolescence with the concept of androgyny that results in her portrayal as a masculinised female. Tellingly, in contrast to Munch’s Puberty, in Kirchner’s Marzella (Fig.75), not only are Fränzi’s limbs angularised, but her torso is pitched forward in an assertive manner and any allusion to genitalia
76. Street, Dresden, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. 1908–19. Canvas, 150.5 by 200.4 cm. (Museum of Modern Art, New York; exh. Neue Galerie, New York).
almost erased. In addition, Fränzi’s facial features – her heavy, dark brows, deep-seated eyes and sombre, candid gaze are rendered as interchangeable with those of a young boy.3 The final section conveys the respective artists’ varied attitudes towards rapid urban expansion and modernity. Included is Heckel’s Landscape in Dresden (Fig.77) depicting a panoramic view of that city’s workingclass, industrial suburb and reminds one of the artist’s former training as an architect. Alternatively, in Schmidt-Rottluff’s animated Houses at night (1912) the artist concentrates upon the pulsation of the blue, green and yellow houses as a means to convey an energetic human presence in contrast to the unpopulated streets upon which they are erected. Of the group it is Kirchner who best captures the modern spirit through his fascination with the urban spectacle of various classes. His Street, Dresden (Fig.76) displayed alongside his Berlin street scene (1913–14; private collection, New York) brilliantly illustrates the artist’s accelerated development in the space of five years and how Berlin’s electrifying environment galvanised his painting. Berlin street scene introduces a com-
77. Landscape in Dresden, by Erich Heckel. 1910. Canvas, 66.5 by 78.5 cm. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; exh. Neue Galerie, New York).
plex compositional arrangement in which the artist’s placement of the mannish, fashionably dressed figures makes his earlier Dresden version look decidedly traditional and underscores its debt to Edvard Munch. To round out the exhibition is a substantial illustrated catalogue4 which includes several essays by recognised specialists who address the Brücke’s early development and influences as well their relation to German national identity and the larger pre-First World War international avant-garde. Notable is Rose Carol Washton-Long’s informative discussion in ‘Brücke and German Expressionism: Reception Reconsidered’ of the marginalisation of the Brücke and German Expressionism, particularly in its American reception. Specifically, she identifies the group’s marginalisation to Alfred H. Barr Jr’s readings of modern art and his elimination of figurative Expressionism from his well-known flow chart. Through the influence of Clement Greenberg’s formalist doctrine, it was also dismissed in the latter part of the twentieth century by the art-historical adherents to the Frankfurt School who privileged the historical avant-garde and its Duchampian legacy. As recently as the 1980s, critical writing ignored German Expressionism (but interestingly, not its French counterpart, Fauvism) or labelled it as a precursor of the so-called regressive art introduced by the Neo-Expressionists and their market-driven supporters.5 It is instructive that only within the current climate of the last two decades with the resurgence of figurative painting has the group been given its full critical due. 1 The only other documented exhibition in the US was Brücke at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, and later at the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester (1970), accompanied by a small illustrated catalogue. For synopses of more recent European exhibitions, see Colin Rhodes’s and Jill Lloyd’s reviews of Brücke in this Magazine, respectively, 144 (2002), pp.183–86; and 147 (2005), pp.350–52.
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2 G. Stanley Hall: Adolescence; its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education, New York 1905. 3 My statements here are based upon research presented in ‘Adolescent Sexuality and Androgyny in Expressionist Art’, a paper given at the German Studies Association conference held in San Diego CA in 2007; see also J. Neubauer: The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence, New Haven 1992, which provides a short discussion of Brücke’s interest in adolescence. 4 Catalogue: Brücke. The Birth of Expressionism in Berlin and Dresden, 1905–1913. Edited by Reinhold Heller. 232 pp. incl. 243 col. + 24 b. & w. ills. (Neue Galerie, New York, 2009), $55. ISBN 978–1–93179–42–35. 5 See, for example, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s essay ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression’, October 16 (Spring 1981), pp.39–68. For an earlier discussion of the reception of Brücke, see R. Reisenfeld: ‘Collecting and Collective Memory: German Expressionist Art and Modern Jewish Identity’, in C. Soussloff, ed.: Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1999, pp.114–34.
Gustave Caillebotte Bremen, Copenhagen and Brooklyn by FELIX KRÄMER
Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris street, rainy day (Art Institute of Chicago) reproduced millions of times on posters, t-shirts, mugs and umbrellas, but in a peculiar way the fame of this image obscures the name of the artist. Unlike his friends Degas, Monet and Renoir, Caillebotte is not a household name, even though contemporary newspaper reviews during his lifetime and the subsequent literature on Impressionism make it clear that he was one of the most frequent contributors to the Impressionist exhibitions and was regarded as completely equal to his peers. Belonging to a wealthy Parisian family, he attended, after having obtained a law degree in 1870, Léon Bonnat’s studio as well as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In addition to pursuing his own artistic interests, he was active as a patron and collector of Impressionist art, his collection later forming the basis of the Impressionist holdings of the Musée d’Orsay. But as a painter Caillebotte quickly fell into oblivion. John Rewald’s laconic verdict reads thus: ‘Gustave Caillebotte, an engineer, was a specialist in ship building and owner of several yachts; he also painted in his spare time’.1 Only recently has there been a reappraisal of Caillebotte’s work: the large retrospective in 1994–95 in Paris, Chicago and Los Angeles, was the first to introduce the artist to a larger public.2 The most recent show devoted to the artist was held in 2005 at the Musée de l’Hermitage in Lausanne.3 Now, the Kunsthalle in Bremen, the Ordrupgaard in Copenhagen and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (where the show is on view to 5th July), have joined forces to ‘reassess’ Caillebotte, as the German exhibition’s subtitle, An Impressionist rediscovered, put it.4 The starting point does not lie in the participating WE FIND
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78. A traffic island, Boulevard Haussmann, by Gustave Caillebotte. 1880. Canvas, 81 by 101 cm. (Private collection; exh. Brooklyn Museum, New York).
museums owning major works by the artist, but rather the enthusiasm of the curators, Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Dorothee Hansen and Gry Hedin; they received support from the descendants of the artist, who still own many of his most important paintings. The exhibition begins with the early works whose precise technique and dark palette are at times reminiscent of Degas and stand in contrast to the emphasis on different colour values and vigorous brushwork characteristic of most other Impressionists. Caillebotte’s interest was in the depiction of urban life. Among Impressionists, he was the most uncompromising chronicler of Haussmann’s radical rebuilding of Paris. In addition to images of passers-by or workmen, views of interiors occupy a special place in his œuvre: of the nearly eighty works that he showed in the Impressionist exhibitions, almost half represent his own living quarters. Several of these rarely seen works – all still in
the possession of the family – are in the exhibition. In these representations Caillebotte plays with the expectations of the viewer and breaks conventions: he reverses the roles of the sexes, depicts home as a place of underlying tensions and captures the loneliness of the people who inhabit the public spaces of a large city. To this end he employs unexpected cropping of the image and startling perspectives, which today’s viewer still associates with photography. When Caillebotte guides our gaze from an elevated perspective through a balcony grille to the street below (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; no.17); transforms the view of a traffic island into a near-abstract composition (no.18; Fig.78); or records the impact of raindrops on the surface of water (no.22), it becomes clear how his austere brushwork dissolves into a virtuoso rendition of reality. Thus it is not surprising that artists were among the most determined advocates of his paintings; 79. Skiffs on the Yerres, by Gustave Caillebotte. 1877. Canvas, 88.9 by 116.2 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington; exh. Brooklyn Museum, New York).
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Film and video New York by MORGAN FALCONER
speed (Fig.80). He is not interested in bringing a specific moment to life, instead he searches for the depiction of order – more than his Impressionist colleagues, he wishes to bring out the essence of a composition and bring its linear structure to the fore. His landscapes are empty: where one would expect to see people, they are often lacking, and if they are present, they appear isolated from their environment, or indeed from the beholder. Caillebotte’s distance from his subject is particularly evident in the depiction of his carefully cultivated flowers. He places them before a neutral background, as if they were images in a plantsman’s handbook, applying the strategy he had developed in the city to the depiction of nature. However, gradually his desire to engage in visual experiments disappears, and Caillebotte seems to have abandoned painting some years before his death in 1894. This carefully chosen exhibition offers a rare opportunity to follow the painter of modern Paris to his retreat on the edge of the city and subsequently to Gennevilliers. Although some famous works are not in the exhibition – the Paris street, rainy day from Chicago; the Orsay Floor scrapers (but included is Fig.34 on p.309 of this issue); and the Pont de l’Europe from Geneva (but a sketch for the last one is in the show; no.12) – it allows for the exploration and rediscovery of lesserknown aspects of Caillebotte’s art.
THE EARLY FILMS of Kenneth Anger are wellknown and now widely available on DVD, so the current survey of them at P.S. (to 14th September) may feel somewhat redundant, but it reminds one of the remarkable changes that have transformed every aspect of film and video art – its forms, its techniques of production and its audiences – since the emergence of this West Coast pioneer. Anger’s first, narrow audience was not in the galleries but in independent, experimental cinema, and his early films show how much he derived from the conventions of Hollywood, even while they sought new directions. The earliest, Fireworks (1947), is a fragmented and fantastic narrative of homosexual desire, while Puce Moment (1949) is a camp, comic hymn to feminine style – but both are essentially character driven, and their soundtracks, as well as qualities of Anger’s direction, owe much to conventional movies. What Anger would resist most determinedly – and what all art filmmakers have since resisted – are Hollywood’s narrative techniques, and in the struggle to do so he fixed on some influential alternatives. Occasionally, in works such as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954–66; Fig.81), Anger’s Dionysian tribute to Aleister Crowley, the direction and the degree of flamboyant artifice come close to theatre, even though it was in this film that he first started to layer and collage his imagery, a technique which lends a highly visionary quality, and one which he continued to exploit. In works like Kustom Kar Kommandoes (1965), his paean to the Southern Californian motorbike culture, he often employed camerawork typical of documentaries, while still making a film that was almost fetishistic in its fascination with bikes. One could argue that contemporary artists have learned important lessons from films such as Kustom Kar Kommandoes: they have come to see how objects or environments can be made to yield up narratives. The American-born Daria Martin gave an exemplary demonstration of this in her latest film, Minotaur (Fig.82),
1 J. Rewald: The History of Impressionism, New York 1961 (1st ed. 1946), p.349. 2 A. Distel et al.: exh. cat. Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, Paris (Grand Palais), Chicago (Art Institute) and Los Angeles (County Museum of Art) 1994–95. 3 J. Willi-Cosandier: exh. cat. Caillebotte: Au cœur de l’impressionisme, Lausanne (Fondation de l’Hermitage) 2005. 4 Catalogue: Über das Wasser – Gustave Caillebotte. Ein Impressionist wieder entdeckt. Edited by Dorothee Hansen, Gry Hedin and Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, with contributions by Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Peter Bürger, Gilles Chardeau, Daniel Charles, Dorothee Hansen, Gry Hedin and Richard Thomson. 140 pp. incl. 143 col. + 5 b. & w. ills. (Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 2008), €35. ISBN 978–3–7757–2190–5; Danish edition: ISBN 978–3–7757–2192–9; English edition: ISBN 978–3–7757–2191–2.
81. Still from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, by Kenneth Anger. 1954–66. Film. (Courtesy of the artist; exh. P.S.1, New York).
80. Regattas at Villers, by Gustave Caillebotte. 1880. Canvas, 75 by 101 cm. (Private collection; exh. Brooklyn Museum, New York).
younger colleagues, such as Edvard Munch, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Signac, found inspiration in his work, an aspect which merits further examination. At the centre of the exhibition stand Caillebotte’s maritime works and his passion for aquatic sports. At the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1878 he surprised his audience with a large group of works that were made at his family’s country seat some twenty kilometres outside Paris. About half of the twenty-eight works that he exhibited showed leisure activities on the river Yerres: angling, swimming, rowing and canoeing. These scenes prompted Caillebotte to adopt the Impressionist aesthetic of his friends; colours became brighter, the brushstrokes more vigorous (Fig.79). Again he employed very unusual viewpoints and abrupt cropping of the images. In his boating scenes he often chose a viewpoint which suggests that the viewer has joined the rowers in their boat, albeit in an elevated and consequently extremely unsteady position. But this ensemble merely formed the prelude to an entire group of maritime works. In 1881 Caillebotte, together with his brother Martial, acquired a property on the banks of the Seine near the village of Gennevilliers, opposite Argenteuil. Gradually he started to spend more time there until in 1887 he finally gave up his apartment in Paris. The background to this decision was undoubtedly Caillebotte’s passion for sailing. He designed and built in his own yard several racing yachts which he subsequently sailed. As a successful regatta competitor and ingenious boat designer, he played an important role in French sailing, all of which is extensively documented in the show through half-models, construction plans and photographs. As Paris disappears from Caillebotte’s works, his imagery becomes more tranquil: he paints his rural surroundings, whether on the Seine or on the coast of Normandy, mostly from a distance and in a strangely disengaged manner. But none of his seascapes capture the experience of sailing; one looks in vain for a battle with the elements in stormy weather or the sensation of
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82. Still from Minotaur, by Daria Martin. 2008. Film. (New Museum, New York).
which was premiered at the New Museum (closed 2nd March).1 It took as its object Rodin’s eponymous 1886 sculpture, and brought it to fleshy life by splicing close-up footage of the bronze with footage of a dance, composed by the noted postmodern choreographer Anna Halprin, which was itself inspired by the sculpture. The sculpture and the dance were further bound together by a narrative which imagined the moment of Halprin’s inspiration as she leafs through a catalogue of Rodin’s sculptures and comes upon Minotaur. This framing narrative had awkward moments, but Martin segued from dance to sculpture with grace, sometimes exploiting the reflective qualities of the bronze to bring flesh tones to its surface, almost as if the sculpture had flushed with blood. Closer to Anger in spirit if not technique was Alex Bag’s Untitled (2009) film installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art (closed 12th April). Bag came to prominence in the mid-1990s with video-based satires on television, something that perhaps puts her at the confluence of Anger’s satirical streak and 83. Still from Her, by Candice Breitz. 1978–2008. Film. (Copyright Candice Breitz, courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert, New York; exh. Yvon Lambert, New York).
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the more cerebral investigations of the medium of television that preoccupied early video artists. For this show, her first solo presentation in a museum, she returned to her favourite territory, creating a spoof on the 1970s American children’s show The Patchwork Family (in which her mother was once hostess); she screened it in a room decorated in zany fashion with deep blue walls, a shag-pile rug and multi-coloured benches. Her version of the programme featured a dour, stuffed devil figure talking back to various presenters, including a singer, an artist and a hostess, all going through routines wildly inappropriate for the children. The film had some wit, but it showed the foolhardiness of attempting to parody television, a medium which pays comics to do just that every night. Bag’s Untitled failed to distinguish itself from such professional parodies and seemed merely laboured, rather than dark, as was perhaps its intention. Being essentially photographic media, film and video have always offered excellent tools of appropriation, and in the galleries their object has often been earlier film and video.
This was the case in Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. (1997), the film with which Johan Grimonprez established his considerable reputation, and it is also the case in DOUBLE TAKE (2009), his second film essay, which premiered at the Sean Kelly Gallery (closed 21st March). Again, Grimonprez raided the archives for his footage, but on this occasion he worked with the novelist Tom McCarthy to devise a narrative that wove together Cold War crises with Alfred Hitchcock’s thoughts on body-doubles and on the manufacture of fear. Grimonprez sought to persuade us that the media thrived on transforming politics and history into a barely credible thriller, and that for many, fear of the Bomb and fear of the dark had became one and the same. At times the film narrative seemed too loosely strung together, and the argument too faintly sketched, to convince; one felt that, with a big screen replaying some of the most emotive footage of the period, Grimonprez had made as much theatre of the Cold War as the broadcast media had done. Yet the interweaving of Hitchcock with history was more than playful, and reminded one that, at times, moments in the Cold War were indeed almost too awful to be credible. A greater disappointment was Candice Breitz’s new work, showing at Yvon Lambert (closed 21st March). To create Him she culled films for footage of Jack Nicholson (the work was dated 1968–2008, in recognition of the date of Nicholson’s first film), and for Her (1978–2008; Fig.83) she did the same for footage of Meryl Streep. Wizardry enabled her to reverse the images and black out the actors’ backdrops, and this left her with a series of talking heads which she arrayed about a series of seven screens, different heads popping up to speak, creating what almost seemed like a scripted dialogue. It was an impressive trick, but its purpose was dimly obscure; it failed to say anything much about the character of performance – the peculiarity of actors having one essential and many alternative personalities – and better means could have been found to demonstrate the endurance of gender stereotypes in the movies. Yael Bartana provided a much more engaging response to the history of cinema in Summer Camp (2007), which was shown along with four other films by the young Israeli artist at P.S. (closed 4th May).2 To create it, Bartana shot a simple documentary showing volunteers from the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition, building a house; he then edited it to fit the soundtrack of Helmar Lerski’s Zionist propaganda film Avodah (1935), and showed the latter on a screen behind his own film. One film showed the epic romance of construction, the other its more basic, remedial nature. Bartana’s films are usually brief and simple, and perhaps technology gives them a slick, impressive quality that the likes of Kenneth Anger had to labour much harder to achieve by less facile means, but they carry potent allegories: Kings of the Hill (2003) depicts four-wheel drive enthusiasts trying to mount hills near Tel
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Aviv; Wild Seeds (2005) shows young Israelis playing a boisterous game in which one side tries to stay united and bound together in a tangle on the ground while the other tries to pull them apart; and Trembling Time (2001) records the stopping traffic during an annual Israeli ritual in which everyone halts to remember all the soldiers who have died since the nation’s founding. If, for Anger, film was a means to unlock fantasy, for many artistfilmmakers today it can also be a means of documentary, of historical reflection, of satire and spectacle; unlike him, though, they can be sure of an audience. 1 Catalogue: Daria Martin, Minotaur. With an essay by Dominic Molon. 87 pp. incl. 30 col. + 13 b. & w. ills. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2009), $18.95. ISBN 978–0–933856–88–2. 2 Catalogue: Short Memory: Yael Bartana. By Yael Bartana. 184 pp. incl. 113 col. + 71 b. & w. ills. (Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, and P.S.1 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008), $19.95. ISBN 978–965–7463–00–0.
Edvard Munch Chicago by RACHEL SLOAN W I TH T H E E X C E P T I O N of Van Gogh, no artist appears to exemplify so completely the romantic conception of the creator as a tortured, isolated figure whose genius was inextricably bound up with mental illness as does Edvard Munch. Raised in a strict, religious household, losing his mother and sister at an early age, entangled in tempestuous love affairs, misunderstood by his contemporaries and periodically checking himself into sanatoria in a vain search of a cure for alcoholism and fragile nerves, Munch was all but tailor-made for the critics who vilified him as a madman and acclaimed him as a true original who owed little or nothing either to the artistic traditions of Scandinavia or the innovations of the Continental avant-garde. The enduring popularity of The scream is ample proof of the staying power of this myth. However, Munch was hardly a passive victim of critics eager to pigeonhole him and his art. As his letters and epigrammatic, highly quotable diaries (written from the first with an eye to publication) reveal, this shrewd, clear-eyed and – yes – sane man participated willingly and even eagerly in the construction of his own legend; as he noted to his aunt following the scandalous closure of his oneman show at the Verein Berliner Künstler in 1892: ‘I could hardly have had better publicity’. He also carefully expunged from his writings references – especially admiring ones – to contemporary artists in order to emphasise the uniqueness of his vision. The Chicago Art Institute’s excellent Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth (closed 26th April) undertook the complex task of deconstructing
these myths, focusing on Munch’s formative years (1888–1915). Although its curator, Jay A. Clarke, is not the first scholar to suggest that Munch was, in her phrase, ‘a sponge’, drawing inspiration from a highly eclectic range of contemporary artists, the exhibition and its catalogue represented the most sustained, multi-faceted and vivid attempt thus far to demythologise Munch and, perhaps even more important, to firmly ground him in the artistic and social concerns of his time.1 Chicago may not have seemed an obvious venue for a Munch show, but the Art Institute in fact boasts impressive holdings of his prints, a collection which, along with generous loans of his paintings from Norwegian museums, formed the core of the exhibition. Showing 145 works spread over fifteen galleries could have proved overwhelming, a danger averted by a tightly focused hang in which each thematically organised gallery could easily have functioned as a freestanding display, but which together described a trajectory from light to dark to light that in itself helps to turn the idea of Munch as unswerving miserabilist on its head. (The absence of both painted versions of The scream, which no longer travel, seemed to this reviewer a blessing rather than a loss, allowing intriguing and often overlooked portions of Munch’s œuvre to emerge from its shadow.) Indeed, the first room, containing four exquisitely self-dramatising self-portraits, including the celebrated Selfportrait with cigarette (cat. no.38), confronted Munch’s mythmaking head-on; the pitfalls
of simplistic biographical readings and of taking the artist’s persona as a raffish, emotionally unstable outsider at face value were underscored by Salome (no.82), in which Munch presents himself entangled in the serpentine tresses of a smiling femme fatale – the ‘femme fatale’ was in fact the English musician Eva Mudocci, a platonic friend, not a vampiric lover. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this ostensibly monographic show was the number of works on view by other artists – nearly onethird of the total. Ranging from Scandinavian painters (Eilif Peterssen, Magnus Enckell, Harriet Backer, Vilhelm Hammershøi), whose work is little-known and seldom seen in North America, to northern European painters with whom Munch’s work displays noticeable affinities (Ensor, Klinger, Böcklin) to the initially incongruous Monet, Caillebotte and Cézanne, this rich array not only effectively saved the exhibition from the lack of contextual grounding that too often plagues monographic shows, it also made a compelling argument for Munch’s omnivorous tendencies, scrupulously supported by notes on each label indicating when and where the artist might have encountered each work or a reproduction thereof. Even without the aid of labels, however, the visual dialogues between the work of Munch and his peers were illuminating. The suite of rooms dedicated to images of the street and anxiety demonstrated the merits of this approach. Although he never admitted it, Munch, who lived in Paris on and off 84. Rue de Rivoli, by Edvard Munch. 1891. Canvas, 81 by 65.1 cm. (Harvard Art Museums, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge MA; exh. Art Institute of Chicago).
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85. Anxiety, by Edvard Munch. 1894. Canvas, 94 by 73 cm. (Munch Museum, Oslo; exh. Art Institute of Chicago).
between 1889 and 1891, was fascinated by Impressionist views of the modern city; as Clarke notes, there was no equivalent tradition of urban views in Norwegian art for him to draw upon. His radiant Rue de Rivoli (no.7; Fig.84) borrows heavily from Caillebotte’s compositions, particularly in the bird’s-eye viewpoint of a worldly flâneur looking down from one of Haussmann’s balconies, but its dashing brushwork and palpable sense of headlong motion not only appears to presage the
concerns of Futurism, it also foreshadowed the swirling energy of The scream (the lithographic version; no.36) and Anxiety (no.20; Fig.85). This nightmarish cortège of green-faced, saucer-eyed ghouls in bourgeois costume, and its marginally more naturalistic predecessor, Evening on Karl Johan (no.10), were shown not only to be outgrowths of the apparently innocuous genre scene At the general store in Vrengen (no.1), but as possible responses to the anxieties over class and gender expressed in George Clausen’s Schoolgirls, Haverstock Hill (no.96) and to Ensor’s scathing masquerades (no.102). Examinations of several of Munch’s other apparent obsessions – sexual anxiety (his imagery owed debts not only to expected sources such as Stuck, Klinger and Rops but also to Rossetti, Rodin and ToulouseLautrec), the death of his sister Sophie (the repetition of the subject not only reflects the currency of sickroom and deathbed scenes in Scandinavian painting, but also Munch’s keen business sense – it was a strong seller), his penchant for representing himself as a persecuted Christ-figure (a favourite trope of Gauguin and Ensor) – were similarly enlightening. Munch’s landscapes and bathing scenes, a significant part of his œuvre often overshadowed by his more emotionally fraught work, received their fair due here. While the prevalence of moody blue tonalities and isolated female figures posed before water inscribed him firmly within a Scandinavian tradition, and his interest in native folklore was characteristic of emerging nations in latenineteenth century Europe, the spare elegance, verging on abstraction, of many of his
landscapes firmly distinguished him from his contemporaries. His predilection for borrowing from himself was shown to powerful effect in Summer night’s dream: the voice (no.19) and Moonlight (no.35; Fig.86), which opened and closed the exhibition; both depicted the same Åsgårdstrand shore, but the removal of the figure from the latter picture transformed the scene from one of ecstatic (possibly erotic) reverie to one of ineffable tranquillity. The luminous bathing scenes, meanwhile, were revered by the German Expressionists, who regarded Munch as a father figure; that the influence flowed in both directions was suggested by a 1915 woodcut (no.87), whose crude, primitivising facture echoes the technique of the younger artists. All of the foregoing might suggest that the Munch presented in this exhibition was a cynical self-publicist and an unoriginal artist. Happily, this was far from being the case. Indeed, the emphasis placed on his technical innovations, particularly as a printmaker, combined with the painstaking reconstruction of the artistic universe within which he moved, engendered a far richer and more complex understanding of the man and his art. Munch’s mythologising – personal and visual – may have been taken to pieces, but rather than diminishing his art, the show revealed previously unsuspected layers of meaning in it. 1 Catalogue: Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth. By Jay A. Clarke. 232 pp. incl. 170 col. + 50 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, and Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), $50 (HB). ISBN 978–0–30011–950–3; $34.95 (PB). ISBN 978–0–86559–228–5.
Wu Guanzhong Beijing by DAVID CARRIER and LIU HAIPING
1919, the son of a poor primary school teacher, Wu Guanzhong entered the National Hangzhou Art College in 1936 and remained at the school when, during the Japanese invasion, it moved inland. In 1947 he won a fellowship to Paris, but after graduation returned in 1950 to China, where he survived much politically motivated criticism. From 26th February to 8th March five galleries of the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, displayed the 183 large oil or ink paintings, mostly made after the early 1970s, donated by Wu to that museum and, to the Art Museums of Singapore and Shanghai.1 ‘Art is wild’, he has said, ‘and the crucial point of an artist lies in individuality. An artist ought to refuse to be fed by others, run his own course, and keep his spirit and style at any price’. And that is what he has consistently done. No wonder that his political and art world enemies called him a formalist. During the 1960s, refused permission to paint, Wu was forced to live in the countryside, BORN IN
86. Moonlight, by Edvard Munch. 1895. Canvas, 93 by 110 cm. (National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; exh. Art Institute of Chicago).
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87. Roots taken in the South, by Wu Guanzhong. 1998. Ink and colour on ‘xuan’ paper, 145 by 368 cm. (National Art Museum of China, Beijing).
and while working in a village during a re-education campaign, he painted the ravishing Melon vines (1972; Shanghai). A year later, The Yangtze River Bridge at Nanjing (1973; Singapore) transforms the least poetic subject imaginable into an aesthetic vision. His sense of humour survived this often perilous life. Early on Wu was a gifted imitator of early twentieth-century French Modernism. The mountain of flowers and fruits (1960; Singapore), for example, is a picture that Utrillo would have been proud to paint; and Dream (nude) (1990; Singapore) is reminiscent of Modigliani (Wu destroyed many early nudes during the Cultural Revolution). The extreme colours in the background of Endless autumn (2008; National Art Museum of China) may owe something to Van Gogh, one of Wu’s great loves. But then, starting in the 1970s, he discovered his roots in Chinese visual culture. Some pictures may appear related to types of Western abstraction: Roaring (1998; Singapore) looks like a Willem de Kooning, although the colour scheme is different; with its vigorous abstract brushwork, Faded lotus flowers and fresh willow leaves (2003; Shanghai) resembles some of Joan Mitchell’s works but, as the title signals,
it represents flowers. The wild grass with idle flowers (1993; Shanghai) has affinities with Arshile Gorky’s last abstractions; the all-over Roots taken in the South (Fig.87) is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s paintings. But unlike many of his Western contemporaries, Wu has always remained a figurative painter. In this, he is very much associated with the Chinese tradition. ‘Beauty is conceived in life’, he writes. ‘Life is endless, and so is beauty.’ The subject of Painting and calligraphy (1996; National Art Museum of China) is not one readily accessible to a Western artist, nor is the scene in A night feast over a thousand years (1997; Singapore), which reprises a famous old Chinese painting in a modern style. Withering lotuses (2007; National Art Museum of China) uses calligraphic-like ink drawing to represent its subject; and in A sauce shop (2000; Singapore), the bold black Chinese ideograms stand out on a white wall. Wu can paint almost anything: the nuns in On the journey (1987; Shanghai), recollected from his trip, fifty years earlier, to France; Shakespeare’s hometown (1992; National Art Museum of China), with its marvellous vertical stripes; A country homestead in England (I) (1992; Shanghai), which in his hands becomes a magnificent
looming brown form. The Louvre Palace (1989; Shanghai), a touristic scene, is transfigured into a great study in grey, brown and white. He even has success with kitsch subjects such as Pandas (1992; Singapore) or A mother leopard and her cub (1993; Singapore). In recent decades Wu’s very Chinese sensibility is even more to the fore. The racy vertical black line in The Great Wall (I) (1986; Shanghai) outlines the wall, and the delicate ink-washes in Spring snow in Bashan Mountain (1983; National Art Museum of China) and in Mountains (1986; Shanghai) look like traditional scroll paintings, viewed very close up. There is really no precedent in Western art for his A mountain city alongside the Yangtze River (2003; Shanghai), with its daringly painted rows of high houses, or In red and white (2003; Singapore), with its great white strokes of paint. And the pink he has used for the enormous female nude in The pink whirlwind (2008; National Art Museum of China), as well as in other recent paintings, is distinctively Chinese (Fig.88). Wu is a great artist because he makes incredibly varied pictures, never settling into a signature style; because his varied landscapes show his unfailing love for his native land; because he has continued in old age to develop marvellously; and because his triumphant survival has enabled him to bring about a unique synthesis of the visual cultures of Western modernism and his own country. ‘I wish to build a bridge between the East and the West’, he has said, ‘between laymen and experts, and between the concrete and the abstract’. In this he has succeeded magnificently. Chinese political life seems not to have entered his art, which is always about visual pleasure. ‘Seeking beauty is my profession and obligation. It is the entire purpose of my life’. Wu is not yet famous in the West, although he has had major exhibitions in America and England. But in his own country he is a living cultural hero, and judging by this exhibition alone, he is as great as any of our canonical modernists. 1
88. Flight, by Wu Guanzhong. 2006. Ink and colour on ‘xuan’ paper, 41 by 70 cm. (National Art Museum of China, Beijing).
Catalogue: Cultivation and Devotion: Works of Art Donated by Wu Guanzhong. Prefaces by Fan Di’an and the artist, essays by Shui Tianzhong, Kwok Kian Chow and Wang Xiomei. 436 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2009), 800 RMB. ISBN 978–7–102–04556–6.
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Calendar London . Works by the Newcastle-based artist Matt Stokes, including the newly commissioned song and film The Gainsborough Packet, are on view here to 28th June. Alan Cristea. Works by Joe Tilson; to 30th May. Albion. Works by Vito Acconci are on view to 13th June. An exhibition of work by the Algerian artist Kader Attia can be seen to 9th June. Annely Juda. Twenty-eight landscape and portrait prints by David Hockney created using Photoshop are on display here to 11th July. Barbican. Seen earlier in Liverpool, the survey of the life and work of Le Corbusier runs here to 24th May; it is reviewed on p.329 above. Beaux-Arts. Small works on paper and canvas by Sandra Blow (1925–2006); to 30th May. Ben Uri Gallery. An exhibition of some 150 drawings by the sculptor Lipchitz runs here from 6th May to 26th July. British Museum. The Museum’s series focusing on great leaders continues with Shah ‘Abbas: the Remaking of Iran; to 14th June; to be reviewed. Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, seen previously in Washington and Seattle and reviewed in the April issue, runs here from 28th May to 23rd August. Seen previously in Edinburgh and reviewed in the January issue, The Intimate Portrait: drawings, miniatures and pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence, runs here to 31st May. The 11 wall-paintings from the tomb-chapel of an Egyptian official called Nebamun, from c.1350 BC, are again on show following their conservation (Room 61). Calvert . Works by contemporary Russian artists; to 14th June. Camden Arts Centre. An exhibition of new and recent works by Michael Raedecker runs to 28th June. Courtauld Gallery. Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence focuses on the Courtauld’s cassoni; to 17th May; to be reviewed. Daniel Katz. A loan exhibition organised by Julian Barran celebrates Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet and its first perfomrance, a century ago, in Paris; portraits, designs and photographs are on view here, with a focus on Larionov and Gontcharova; 14th May to 8th June. Design Museum. An exhibition of works by the contemporary fashion designer Hussein Chalayan runs here to 17th May. Drawing Room. The 2009 Biennial Fundraiser exhibition closes with an auction on the 20th May. Dulwich Picture Gallery. The reconstruction of Veronese’s Petrobelli altarpiece runs to 3rd May (then in Blanton and Ottawa). Robert Upstone’s loan exhibition Sickert in Venice explores the artist’s views of the city and women in interiors; to be reviewed; to 31st May. Estorick Collection. Some 100 photographs from the RIBA British Architectural Library collection comprise the exhibition Framing Modernism: Architecture & Photography in Italy 1926–1965; on view to 21st June. Fan Museum. An exhibition devoted to fans showing biblical scenes runs here to 31st May. Fine Art Society. Works by Christopher Cook are on view to 8th May. Fleming Collection. Works of art from the collection selected by Tim Cornwell, arts correspondent for The Scotsman, are on view to 27th June. Flowers. An exhibition of work by the London-based Japanese artist Jiro Osuga comprise a series of muralsize paintings showing café scenes embodying contemporary life; to 23rd May.
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Gagosian Gallery. Five large new paintings by Cy Twombly, and works by Richard Serra are on view at Britannia Street; to 9th May. At Davies Street, new works by Richard Hamilton are on view to 30th May. Gimpel Fils. New work by Miranda Whall and Flora Whiteley is on view here to 23rd May. Hauser & Wirth. At Piccadilly, new works by the German artist Andreas Hofer; to 9th May. Imperial War Museum. Unspeakable: The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust runs here to 31st August. Karsten Schubert. New prints by Glenn Brown using Lucian Freud, Rembrandt and Urs Graf as models; to 8th May; see also Tate Liverpool. Thereafter, paintings by Robert Holyhead; 20th May to 17th July. Lisson Gallery. A survey exhibition of works by Dan Graham including pieces from throughout his career runs here to 9th May. Thereafter works by the Berlin-based British artist Jonathan Monk, from 20th May to 13th June. National Gallery. A modified version of the exhibition charting the influence of old-master and 19th-century painting on Picasso, seen earlier in Paris and the subject of the Editorial in the December issue, runs here to 7th June; it was reviewed in the April issue. A display of 13 Picasso prints coincides with the show.
89. Portrait of John Dryden, by John Michael Wright. c.1668. Canvas, 76.8 by 63.5 cm. (National Portrait Gallery, London). National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition devoted to John Constable’s portraits, reviewed on p.331 above, runs here to 14th June (then at Compton Verney). An exhibition devoted to portraiture in the work of Gerhard Richter runs here to 31st May; see the review of Richter’s recent exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, in the February issue. The Gallery has acquired a portrait of John Dryden as Poet Laureate by John Michael Wright (Fig.89). Orel Art. Curated by Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, the inaugural exhibition of Ilona Orel’s London gallery at Howick Place, specialising in contemporary Russian art, will show works by Andrei Molodkin; to 12th June. Parasol Unit. An exhibition of works (1980–86) by Robert Mangold runs here to 9th May. The exhibition Parades and Processions: Here comes everybody shows work by eleven contemporary artists who use the theme of parades; from 28th May to 24th July. Queens Gallery. French Porcelain for English Palaces: Sèvres from the Royal Collection runs from 23rd May to 11th October. Raven Row. The inaugural exhibition of this gallery at Artillery Lane is of works by the New York collage and mail artist Ray Johnson; to 10th May.
Royal Academy. In the Madejski Fine Rooms works from the RA’s permanent collection examine High Art: Reynolds and History Painting and the loan of W.P. Frith’s Private view at the Royal Academy, 1881 (1883), shown with other late Victorian paintings; to 29th November. Prints by Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller collection are on display to 7th June. Panoramic watercolours by Royal Academician Adrian Berg are displayed to mark the artist’s 80th birthday; to 11th June. Saatchi Gallery. Collect 2009, an international fair for contemporary design, takes place here from 15th to 17th May. St Paul’s Cathedral. Paintings by G.F. Watts from the collection of the Watts Gallery, on religious and spiritual themes, are displayed here to 30th July; it was reviewed in the April issue. Serpentine Gallery. Films by Luke Fowler; 7th May to 14th June. Sir John Soane’s Museum. An exhibition devoted to George Scharf’s watercolours of early Victorian London runs to 6th June; to be reviewed. South London Gallery. The first performance in Britain of the American choreographer William Forsythe’s Additive Inverse can be seen here on the 4th and 5th (4, 5, 6 and 7pm) and 6th (2, 3, 4, 5pm) of May. Sculptures by Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci are exhibited from 15th May to 28th June. Sprüth Magers. New photographs by Cindy Sherman are on display to 30th May. Tate Britain. The loan exhibition Van Dyck and Britain, reviewed on p.327 above, runs to 17th May. A collections display recreating William Blake’s only one-man exhibition, mounted by the artist in his brother’s shop in Golden Square in May 1809, runs to 4th October; to be reviewed. An in-focus display shows works by Polish Symbolist artists alongside their British contemporaries; to 21st June. Tate Modern. The exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism provides a dual-survey of paintings and design by the Russian avant-garde artists and their contemporaries; to 17th May; it was reviewed in the April issue. An overview of works by the American artist Roni Horn is on view here to 25th May. Timothy Taylor. New works by Ron Arad can be seen to 9th May. Victoria and Albert Museum. An ambitious exhibition exploring the European Baroque runs here to 19th July; to be reviewed. A Higher Ambition: Owen Jones (1809–74) traces Jones’s contributions to Victorian design reform, from his studies of Islamic decoration at the Alhambra Palace, through to his designs for the 1851 Great Exhibition building, the publication of the Grammar of Ornament and his influence in the founding of the South Kensington Museum; to 22nd November. The Museum’s new Theatre and Performance Galleries have opened with selected items on view from this collection of English theatrical material. Waddington. A group show of gallery artists runs from 4th May to 1st June. Wallace Collection. Treasures of the Black Death, reviewed on p.332 above, runs to 10th May. Whitechapel Gallery. Inaugural exhibitions of the recently reopened Gallery include the first major retrospective of work by the German sculptor Isa Genzken (to 21st June). Works from the British Council Collection, selected by Michael CraigMartin, focusing on works purchased early in an artist’s career, are exhibited in a display running to 14th June. White Cube. At Mason’s Yard, paintings by Fred Tomaselli are on view to 16th May. At Hoxton Square, works by Ashley Bickerton are on view to 9th May. Whitfield Fine Art. A retrospective of painting, drawing and sculpture by Thomas Nathaniel Davies is on view here from 21st May to 19th June.
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Great Britain and Ireland Barnard Castle, Bowes Museum. Canaletto and the View Painters of Venice puts into context the Museum’s two famous large Canalettos acquired in 1980; to 27th July. Bath, Victoria Art Gallery. New sculptures and wire drawings by Sophie Ryder are on display to 10th June. Bedford, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery & Bedford Museum. The Bedford Gallery, a 19th-century listed building, is a new addition to the Museum and opens with an exhibition of treasures from the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery; to 17th May. Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Northern Lights: Swedish Landscapes from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; to 31st May. Northern European landscape prints from the Institute’s permanent collection are on view to 31st May. Matthew Boulton and the Art of Making Money; 8th May 2009 to 16th May 2010. Birmingham, Ikon Gallery. The first exhibition devoted entirely to the vignettes of the extraordinary artist-engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) runs here to 25th May. Concurrently, newly commissioned and recent video works by John Wood and Paul Harrison. At Ikon Eastside, works 1970 to 2000 by the Polish artist Józef Robakowski (b.1939), a pioneer of video art in Poland, are on view to 7th June. At Perrott’s Folly, works by the Swedish-born local artist Sofia Hultén are on view to 25th May. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox, seen earlier in New Haven and reviewed on p.333 above; to 3rd May. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Seen earlier in London and Nottingham, the exhibition The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock, reviewed in the September 2008 issue of this Magazine, can be seen here from 2nd May to 31st August. Bristol, Arnolfini. Commissioned to develop a new project for the Arnolfini, the Belgian artists Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans proposed to turn the gallery into luxury residential units and sell them. The plans for their project comprise an exhibition running to 7th June. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. A display in the Octagon explores Chinese jades from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century; to 31st May. The collection-based displays Changing faces: Anthony van Dyck as an etcher and Kachôfugetsu – the natural world in Japanese prints run to 17th May. Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard. Previously unexhibited work by David Ward, made over the past forty years, can be seen here to 10th May. A group show of work by nine contemporary artists includes work by Claire Barclay and Wade Guyton; from 16th May to 12th July. Cardiff, National Museum. The exhibition Sisley in England and Wales, reviewed in the February issue, runs here to 14th June. Compton Verney. Fatal Attraction: Diana and Actaeon – The Forbidden Gaze seeks to look at the changes in the portrayal of this theme in paintings spanning the Renaissance to contemporary art and includes works by Degas, Picasso, Poussin, Richter, Rodin, Rubens, Schiele and others; to 31st May; to be reviewed. Georgian Portraits: Seeing is Believing is an exhibition of works from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, by artists including Thomas Barker, Arthur Devis, Angelica Kauffmann, Allan Ramsay, Henry Raeburn, George Stubbs and Richard Cosway; 20th May to 13th December. Cookham, Stanley Spencer Gallery. 2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Spencer’s death. The Gallery’s own collection is augmented with works on loan from Tate Britain; to 1st November. Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art. The first exhibition in Ireland of paintings by the American artist Elizabeth Peyton, comprising 20 works, is on view to 21st June.
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. An exhibition devoted to the 18th-century Irish landscape painter Thomas Roberts; to 28th June; to be reviewed. In the small display Vermeer, Fabritius & De Hooch: Three Masterpieces from Delft, the Gallery’s famous Vermeer is joined by Fabritius’s Goldfinch from the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and Pieter de Hooch’s Courtyard of a house in Delft from the National Gallery, London; to 24th May. Dundee, Contemporary Arts. A group exhibition of contemporary art, The Associates, is part of the DCA’s 10th Anniversary Exhibitions programme; to 21st June. Edinburgh, Dean Gallery. The collections exhibition Alive with Innovations. Paolozzi’s Beginnings includes brutalist sculptures, drawings and proto-Pop art collages by Paolozzi that show the diverse sources of inspiration and modes of expression employed by the artist during the 1950s; to 30th June. Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery. Films and photographs by Willie Doherty; to 12th July. Edinburgh, Inverleith House. Works by Cerith Wyn Evans are on view from 9th May to 5th July. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. Previously in Ferrara, Turner in Italy runs to 7th June. Robert Adam’s Landscape Fantasies: Watercolours and Drawings from the Permanent Collection; to 2nd August.
90. Portrait of a lady, probably Katherine Howard, by Hans Holbein. c.1540. Watercolour and bodycolour on vellum laid on playing card, diameter, 6.3 cm. (Royal Collection; exh. Windsor Castle, Drawings Gallery). Edinburgh, Queen’s Gallery. An exhibition tracing the history of the ‘conversation piece’ through works from the Royal Collection runs to 20th September (then in London). Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Works by Hirst, Celmins, Gallagher, Katz, Woodman and Warhol selected from some 700 works comprising the ‘Artist Rooms’ acquisition are displayed here as part of an inaugural series of ‘Artist Rooms’ across the country; to 8th November. Works by international contemporary artists from the collections of Charles Asprey and Alexander Schröder comprise an exhibition running here to 19th July. Glasgow, Hunterian Museum. The Glasgow Boys: Drawings and Watercolours from the Hunterian Collection; to 16th May. The Gentle Art of Making Etchings presents the results of a five-year project, led by the University, to produce an online catalogue raisonné of Whistler’s etchings; to 30th May. Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery. The exhibition Gary Fabian Miller: Time Passage is on display here to 20th June. Leeds Art Gallery. The latest in a series of touring exhibitions curated by artists, commissioned by the Hayward Gallery, Mark Wallinger Curates the Russian Linesman, is here from 16th May to 28th June.
Leeds, Henry Moore Institute. The New Monumentality: Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Dorit Margreiter explores the attraction of modern post-War buildings for the three artists and runs here from 31st May to 30th August. The archive of the Public Art Development Trust, acquired by the Institute in 2005, is on view from 31st May to 30th August. Leeds, Temple Newsam House. Drawn from the collections of Leeds Art Gallery, the exhibition Watercolour Masterpieces: Turner and his Contemporaries runs to 1st November. Lismore Castle Arts. An exhibition curated by Philippe Pirotte comprises works by Stefan Brüggemann, Rita McBride, Corey McCorkle, Jason Rhoades and Ai Weiwei; to 30th September. Liverpool, Tate. A mid-career retrospective of work by Glenn Brown is on display here to 10th May (then in Turin). Seen earlier in New York, the exhibition Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today is on view here from 29th May to 13th September. Manchester Art Gallery. Works by the contemporary British painter Paul Morrison are on view to 31st May. Margate, Turner Contemporary. The exhibition Sound of Music, drawing on the collection of the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkirk, explores the connections between art, music and sound, featuring works by a range of contemporary artists; to 14th June. Milton Keynes Gallery. Works by James Lee Byars (1932–97) selected from the recent retrospective at the Kunstmuseum, Bern, comprise an exhibition running here to 21st June (then in Detroit). Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery. The exhibition Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680): artist–collector of the Baroque includes some thirty drawings that once belonged to the painter; to 31st May. Oxford, Museum of Modern Art. An international group show on the theme of ‘disrupted transmissions’ runs to 21st June. Penzance, Penlee House Gallery & Museum. The exhibition Wild Cornwall shows works by artists alongside scientific specimens examining the county’s flora and fauna; to 13th June. Plymouth, Arts Centre. The first retrospective exhibition of works by the pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott is on view here to 24th May. St Ives, Tate. A summer exhibition combining works by seven fine and applied artists, from Alfred Wallis (1855–1942) to Katy Moran (b.1975), runs from 16th May to 27th September. Salisbury, Roche Court, New Art Centre. A selection of large bronzes by Barry Flanagan go on view in the sculpture park, accompanied by smaller sculptures, prints, drawings and early ceramics, from 16th May to 6th September. Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery. An exhibition of work by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson from the 1930s is on view here from 20th May to 29th August. Sheffield, Millennium Gallery. After a long American tour, the exhibition Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the V. & A. has its final showing here to 31st May. Southampton City Art Gallery. Olympic posters from the V. & A. are on view to 31st May. Sunderland, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. Rank: picturing the social order 1516–2009, seen earlier in Leeds, examines how artists have represented the shape of society from the Renaissance to the present; 15th May to 11th July (then in Blackpool). Windsor, Windsor Castle, Drawings Gallery. An exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne includes many works by Holbein (Fig.90); to 18th April 2010. York Art Gallery. Drawing on the Arts Council Collection and that of the Gallery, an exhibition examining the work of artists from St Ives, from the 1930s to the 1960s runs here to 27th September. A Different View explores past depictions of sites in York through drawings and prints from the permanent collection; to 3rd May. the burl ingt o n magazin e
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Europe Aachen, Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum. The monographic exhibition devoted to Jacob Backer (1608/09–51), reviewed in the February issue, runs here to 7th June. Aix-en-Provence, Musée Granet. An exhibition exploring Picasso’s debt to Cézanne is on view from 25th May to 27th September. Amsterdam, Rembrandthuis. The monographic exhibition devoted to Jan Lievens, seen earlier in Milwaukee and Washington and reviewed on p.336 above, runs here from 17th May to 9th August. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. The exhibition Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night, seen earlier in New York and reviewed in the February issue, runs here to 7th June. Odilon Redon and Emile Bernard explores the collection of Andries Bonger (1861–1936) which was acquired by the Dutch State in 1996 and given to the Museum on long-term loan; to 20th September. Antibes, Musée Picasso. The exhibition Picasso 1945–1949: l’ère du renouveau runs to 14th June. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. An exhibition explores the ‘Grotesque’ through works by Goya, Redon and Ensor; to 14th June. Arezzo, Museo Statale d’arte Medievale e Moderna. An exhibition devoted to the della Robbia family shows their work alongside that of their contemporaries from Ghiberti to Rustici; many works are shown in the churches to which they belong in Casentino and the Val d’Arno; to 7th June; to be reviewed. Asti, Palazzo Mazzetti. An exhibition of 17th- and 18th-century sacred wooden sculpture runs to 18th October. Barcelona, CaixaForum. Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy, seen earlier at Vicenza and London and reviewed in the March issue, runs here from 19th May to 6th September. Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró. The exhibition of works by Kiki Smith, seen earlier in Nuremberg, is on view here to 24th May. Barletta, Pinacoteca De Nittis, Palazzo della Marra. Landscapes south of Rome by painters spanning De Nittis to Fattori are the subject of a show on view to 2nd August. Basel, Fondation Beyeler. African and Oceanic tribal sculpture from public and private collections is displayed alongside modern masterpieces; to 24th May. Basel, Kunstmuseum. Vincent van Gogh. Between Earth and Heaven: The Landscapes comprises some seventy paintings and offers a complete survey of the artist’s works in the genre; to 27th September. Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst. The in-focus exhibition Little Theatre of Gestures explores the role of theatricality in art; 16th May to 15th August. Bassano del Grappa, Museo Remondini. The remarkable collection of prints assembled by the Remondini family of printers includes works by Schongauer, Dürer, Titian and Rembrandt among others; to 4th October. Bergamo, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. Curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, the Esposizione Universale confronts old masters from the Accademia Carrara with 20th-century and contemporary works; to 26th July. Bergamo, Palazzo della Provincia. Russian icons from the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow are on show here to 14th June. Berlin, Altes Museum. An exhibition here focuses on the conservation and restoration of archaeological artefacts from the collections of the National Museums in Berlin; to 1st June. Berlin, Bode-Museum. John Flaxman and the Renaissance runs to 12th July; to be reviewed. Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum. An exhibition exploring Calvinism in Germany and the rest of Europe runs here to 19th July. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. The exhibition Robert Campin, the Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden, previously in Frankfurt, runs here to 21st June; to be reviewed.
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Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. The Art of Interpretation: Italian Reproductive Prints from Mantegna to Carracci; to 14th June. Berlin, Sprüth Magers. Drawings by Robert Therrien are on view to 20th June. Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie. Simon Vouet, the Italian years 1613–1627, previously in Nantes and reviewed in the March issue, runs here to 29th June. Bielefeld, Kunsthalle. Curated by Thomas Kellein, the exhibition 1968: The Great Innocence highlights that year not only as a political revolution but also as a moment of radical change in the arts documented here by works from some 200 artists; to 2nd August. Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum. Following the artist’s installations in the New York Guggenheim, Cai GuoQiang produces here a site-specific version of his exhibition I want to believe, running to 13th September. Bologna, MAMbo. Works by Sarah Morris and by Seth Price are here from 26th May to 26th July. Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle. Some 400 works comprise an overview of Czech photography of the 20th century; to 26th July. A monographic show devoted to Amedeo Modigliani runs here to 30th August. Bregenz, Kunsthaus. An exhibition of work by the German artist Lothar Baumgarten; to 21st June. Bruges, Groeninge Museum. The ambitious exhibition Charles the Bold art, war and court runs here to 21st July (then in Vienna); to be reviewed. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition devoted to Alfred Stevens; 8th May to 23rd August. Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts. From Van Dyck to Bellotto: Splendour at the Court of Savoy is an exhibition organised in collaboration with the Galleria Sabauda, Turin; to 24th May. Cagliari, Centro Exma. An exhibition devoted to Marinetti runs here to 28th June. Caserta, Royal Palace. Art at the Bourbon court at Caserta is the theme of an exhibition running to 6th July. Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Musée Matisse. An exhibition charting the reception of works by Matisse by artists in America and Europe from 1948 to 1968 is on display here to 14th June. Catanzaro, Museo Marca. Alex Katz, Reflections is on show here to 27th September. Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana. An exhibition chronicles the seizure of works of art following Napoleon’s invasion of Italy and the efforts of Pius VII and Antonio Canova to repatriate them; to 26th July. Cologne, Museum Ludwig. Drawings and watercolours by Maria Lassnig made from 1947 to the present are displayed to 14th June. Large paintings by Lucy McKenzie (b.1977), displayed freestanding and evoking interior spaces, are on view to 26th July. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. The exhibition The Moon includes paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, as well as astronomical instruments, that reflect the fascination that the moon has exerted on people throughout the ages; to 16th August. Como, Villa Olmo. An exhibition devoted to Russian masters of the avant-garde, including Kandinsky, Malevich and Chagall, is on show here to 26th July. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst. An exhibition of work by the enfant terrible of Danish art, Wilhelm Freddie (1909–95), including paintings, sculptures and collages, and also the artist’s dress designs, films and window displays, runs to 1st June. Works by the German-born Danish sculptor Christian Lemmerz are on view from 16th May to 6th March 2010. Coruña, Palacio de Exposiciones. The Hague School: Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam runs here to 21st June. Cremona, Museo Civico Ala Ponzone. The suite of 347 prints made by Picasso between March and August 1968 are on show to 5th July.
Darmstadt, Mathildenhöhe. Seen previously in Paris, Masks: Metamorphoses of the Face from Rodin to Picasso, runs here to 7th June (then in Copenhagen). Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse. An exhibition of paintings by Henri Martin (1860–1943) is on view here to 15th June. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie. An exhibition devoted to 18th-century artists working in Dresden; to 2nd June. Düsseldorf, K. The first solo museum exhibition in Europe by the Cuban-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jorge Pardo shows some eighty works from the past fifteen years; to 2nd August. Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast. On paper: our finest drawings: from Raphael to Beuys, from Rembrandt to Trockel runs from 30th May to 30th August. Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum. Videos, films, photographs and sculptures by the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius (b.1964); to 1st June. Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twenthe. An exhibition of Baroque bozzetti from the Alte Galerie at Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, runs here to 1st June. Faenza, Palazzo Milzetti. The Neo-classical Workshop charts the rise of the academic nude study from the foundation of the Accademia de’ Pensieri in Rome in 1790 to the establishment by Canova of the Accademia d’Italia in 1810; to 21st June. Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti. An exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’s work as an engraver; to 2nd June. Florence, Casa Buonarroti. A selection of Italian Renaissance drawings from the Rothschild collection in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, is on show here from 27th May to 14th September. Florence, Museo delle Cappelle Medicee. On the fourth centenary of his death, Grand Duke Ferdinando I is commemorated in an exhibition running from 2nd May to 1st November. Florence, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. The exhibition devoted to the goldsmith’s work of Nicola di Guardiagrele, previously in Rome and L’Aquila and reviewed in the April issue, runs here to 15th May. Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Bernini and the birth of the Baroque Portrait, seen earlier in Los Angeles and Ottawa and reviewed in the March issue, has its last showing here to 12th July. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina. Pietro Benvenuti, Imperial painter at the court of Napoleon and the Lorraine family; to 21st June. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti. The significance of Etruscan, Greek and Roman art for 19th- and 20th-century artists is explored in a show running to 12th July. Florence, Palazzo Strozzi. Four hundred years after Galileo perfected the telescope, an exhibition of astronomical instruments, globes and maps from Ancient Egypt onwards, many of them works of art in their own right, runs here to 30th August. Forlì, Museo di San Domenico. An exhibition of 160 works in all media by Canova and his contemporaries focuses on Canova’s Hebe and shows three versions together with the Hellenistic Dancer from Tivoli that inspired it; to 26th June; to be reviewed. Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle. Works by the Polish artist Aleksandra Mir; 14th May to 26th July. An exhibition promising a look ‘behind the scenes of the contemporary art world’, The Making of Art, is on view here from 29th May to 30th August. Frankfurt, Städel. Caravaggio in the Netherlands. Music and Genre in the Work of Caravaggio and the Utrecht Caravaggists includes some 40 paintings and juxtaposes works by Caravaggio with music and genre scenes by Dirck van Baburen, Gerard van Honthorst and Hendrick Terbrugghen; to 26th July. Taking a much-debated drawing from the permanent collection as its starting point, an exhibition explores problematic attributions of Michelangelo’s drawings through loans from the British Museum, London, and other European collections; to 7th June. Gaillac, Musée des beaux arts. Château de Foucaud. Works in a variety of media by the French artist Mark Brusse are on display here to 25th May. Ghent, SMAK. A retrospective of works by Dara Birnbaum; to 2nd August.
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Graz, Kunsthaus. Diana Thater: gorillagorillagorilla, a multi-channel video installation, is here to 17th May. Groninger Museum. An exhibition of early abstract paintings and prints by the Dutch artist Wobbe Alkema (1900–84) presents a comprehensive survey of this period of the artist’s work; to 14th June. Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Dutch paintings from the Kremer collection, previously seen in Cologne and Kassel, are on show here to 14th June. The Hague, Gemak. Paintings by the Suriname artist Marcel Pinas (b.1971) comprise an exhibition running here to 21st June. The Hague, Gemeentemuseum. A retrospective exhibition of paintings, graphic work and photographs by Christian Schad is on view here to 10th May. Love! Art! Passion! shows work from famous artist couples, including Kahlo and Rivera, and SaintPhalle and Tinguely; to 1st June. An exhibition of work by three contemporary Indian artists, Jitish Kallet (b.1975), Riyas Komu (b.1971) and Sudarshan Shetty (b.1961) is on view here to 21st June. The first of a bipartite exhibition focusing on European glass from 400 to 1900, drawn from the Museum’s own collection, runs to 28th June. Fauve and Expressionist painting from the Triton Foundation are exhibited to 6th September. The Hague, Mauritshuis. An in-focus exhibition puts into context Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Bentheim, a recent acquisition; to 31st May. Hamburg, Bucerius Kunst Forum. Work by Edward Hopper is on view from 9th May to 30th August. Hamburg, Deichtorhallen. A survey exhibition of some fifty paintings and works on paper by Cecily Brown is on view here to 30th August. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. The exhibition devoted to the Neo-classical painter Nicolai Abildgaard, seen previously in Paris, runs here to 14th June. Hanover, Kestnergesellschaft. Fifteen recent paintings by David Salle can be seen here to 21st June. Hanover, Sprengel Museum. Photographs from the collection of the Cologne dealers Ann and Jürgen Wilde, on permanent loan to the Museum, comprise an exhibition running here to 30th August. Humlebaek, Louisiana. The first major presentation of works by Max Ernst in Denmark, Max Ernst. Dream and Revolution, runs to 1st June. Ishøj, Arken Museum. Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin – Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem can be seen here to 7th June. Jena, Stadtmuseum. An exhibition documenting the connections between Jena and the Bauhaus, part of the 2009 Bauhausjahr celebrations; to 7th June. Kassel, Museum Schloss Wilhelmshöhe. Gods in Colour: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, previously in Frankfurt, runs here to 1st June. Linz, Landesgalerie. The exhibition ToulouseLautrec. Der intime Blick, mounted in collaboration with the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, explores the artist’s depictions of modern life and the denizens of Montmartre (Fig.91); to 7th June. A fully illustrated catalogue is available. Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum. Seen previously in Copenhagen, an in-focus display explores the Statens Museum for Kunst’s recently restored Tribute money: Peter finding the silver coin in the mouth of the fish by Jacob Jordaens; to 14th June. A display of the Rijksmuseum’s six tapestries, with themes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woven by Frans Spiering after designs by Karel van Mander, three of which were acquired in 2006; to 13th September. The exhibition Exile on Main St. shows works by a number of artists, including Artschwager, Copley and Westermann, who stood out from mainstream American Pop art in the 1960s; to 16th August. Madrid, CaixaForum. Maurice de Vlaminck: a Fauvist Instinct, Paintings from 1900–15; to 7th July. Madrid, Museo del Prado. The Sleeping Beauty. Victorian Painting from The Museo de Arte de Ponce; to 31st May. A monographic show devoted to Joaquin Sorolla runs here from 26th May to 6th September.
91. Young woman in the studio (Hélène Vary), by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. 1888. Gouache on paper, 74.5 by 49 cm. (Kunsthalle Bremen; exh. Landesgalerie, Linz). Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. A retrospective exhibition of work by the sculptor Julio González is on view here to 1st June. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. An exhibition here and at the Fundación Caja explores the use of shadow in Western art from the Renaissance to the present; to 17th May. Madrid, Palacio Real. Neo-classical taste: Charles IV as patron and collector; to 19th July; to be reviewed. Magny-les-Hameaux, Musée de Port-Royal-desChamps. Drawings by Philippe de Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne and Nicolas de Plattemontagne are on show here to 29th June. Marseille, Centre de la Vieille Charité. An exhibition of paintings by Bernard Buffet; to 7th June. Milan, Palazzo delle Stelline. F.T. Marinetti = Futurismo is part of the celebrations of the centenary of Futurism; to 7th June; it is reviewed on p.340. Milan, Palazzo Reale. Futurismo 1909–2009: Velocità + arte + azione; to 7th June; reviewed on p.340 above. Also here are twenty of Monet’s late paintings shown with 60 prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige from the Musée Guimet, Paris; to 27th September. Armour and other artefacts of the Edo period from the Koelliker collection; to 2nd June. Modena, Foro Boario. Terracotta sculpture by Guido Mazzoni, Niccolò dell’Arca and many others is here to 7th June; to be reviewed. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. For the first time in 300 years, the collection of Dutch, Flemish and Italian Baroque paintings once owned by Johann Wilhelm von der Pfalz (1658–1716) in Düsseldorf and now the core of the collections in Munich goes on show in its entirety; to 17th May. Munich, Haus der Kunst. The exhibition William Eggleston. Democratic Camera – Photographs and Video 1961–2008 is on view here to 17th May (then in Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles). Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung. The exhibition focusing on Haarlem as the cradle of Dutch Golden Age painting, seen earlier in Haarlem itself, runs here to 7th June. Munich, Museum Brandhorst. Opening on the 18th May, this new museum houses the collection of American Modern and Contemporary Art, including a large collection of works by Cy Twombly, belonging to Udo and Anette Brandhorst.
Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Ingres: works from the Musée de Montauban runs to 7th June. Naples, Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina (MADRE). Mettere l’arte al mondo shows the work of the arte povera artist Alighiero Boetti; to 11th May. Neuss, Langen Foundation. A retrospective exhibition of work by Jean Dubuffet; to 24th May (then in Munich and Neumarkt). Padua, Civici Musei agli Eremitani. An exhibition devoted to 16th- and 17th-century portraits in the Museum’s collection, including works by Titian and Bassano among others, that show the city’s intelligentsia and artistic elite, runs to 15th July. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. An exhibition of some 100 drawings by Asger Jorn, drawn largely from the collection of the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark, donated by the artist himself between 1957 and 1972, comprise the first exhibition of Jorn’s work in Paris for over 30 years; to 11th May. Seen earlier in New York, the exhibition devoted to the work produced by Alexander Calder during his years in Paris, 1926–33, can be seen here to 20th July; to be reviewed. Seen earlier in New York and Munich, the retrospective of works by Kandinsky runs here to 10th August; to be reviewed. Paris, Fondation Cartier. Exhibitions of paintings by the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes, and photographs by William Eggleston; to 21st June. Paris, Galerie des Gobelins. Elégance et modernité 1908–1958 explores the use of fabric in furniture and applied arts in the first half of the twentieth century; 5th May to 26th July. Paris, Grand Palais. From Arcimboldo to Dalí: Double Images; to 6th July. A survey of Andy Warhol’s commissioned portraiture from the 1970s and 1980s; to 13th July. The second edition of La Force de l’Art, a triennial event organised by the Ministry of Culture and Communication, curated by Jean-Louis Froment, Jean-Yves Jouannais and Didier Ottinger, is displayed here to 1st June. Paris, Jeu de Paume. An exhibition juxtaposing works by the German artist Harun Farocki and the Canadian artist Rodney Graham; to 14th June. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. An exhibition devoted to the French Baroque architect Jules Hardouin Mansart runs here to 28th June. Paris, Musée des Arts asiatiques–Guimet. Dvâravatî: aux sources du bouddhisme en Thaïlande; to 25th May. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Leaving Rodin behind: Sculpture in Paris between 1905 and 1914 can be seen here to 31st May; to be reviewed. Around Lehmbruck: Sculpture from 1905–1919 is displayed to 14th June. Voir l’Italie et mourir. Photographie et peinture dans l’Italie du XIXe siècle runs to 19th July. Paris, Musée du Louvre. An exhibition exploring the early evolution of the altarpiece up to the early 15th century; to 6th July; to be reviewed. The fantastic world of Ariosto explores how Orlando Furioso (1519) provided subject-matter for artists spanning Niccolo dell’Abate to Ingres; to 18th May. The Gates of Heaven: Visions of the World in Ancient Egypt includes some 350 artefacts spanning the Old Kingdom to the Roman Period that symbolise the passage to the afterworld; to 29th June. A monographic exhibition exploring the work of Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller runs to 18th May (then in Vienna). Paris, Musée du Luxembourg. Filippo and Filippino Lippi: the Renaissance in Prato runs here to 2nd August. Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André. The exhibition The Italian Primitives – Splendours from the Altenburg Museum runs to 21st June. Paris, Petit Palais. William Blake: Le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais, drawn largely from British collections; to 28th June; to be reviewed. Paris, Musée Quai Branly. Works by Matisse, Picasso and Man Ray are included in an exhibition documenting the relationship between art and jazz; to 28th June; to be reviewed. the burl ingt o n magazin e
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Paris, Musée Rodin. Two exhibitions on the theme of portraiture, by Rodin and the contemporary British artist Gillian Wearing, run here to 23rd August. Paris, Pinacothèque. 50 works each by Valadon and Utrillo are on show here to 15th September. Pavia, Scuderie del Castello Visconteo. The kiss: Italian art from Romanticism to the twentieth century runs here to 2nd June. Pont-Aven, Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition of works by the overlooked painter Emma Herland (1856–1947) can be seen here to 1st June. Ravenna, Museo d’Arte della città. The travelling artist, from Gauguin to Klee, from Matisse to Ontani explores the work of artists working outside Europe; to 21st June. Rivoli, Castello. Work by Thomas Ruff is on view here to 21st June. Rome, Académie de France. The exhibition FrançoisMarius Granet: Roma e Parigi, la natura romantica runs here to 24th May. Rome, Casa di Goethe. An exhibition devoted to the Italian landscapes of Johann Martin von Rohden (1778–1868) runs here to 21st June; to be reviewed. Rome, Complesso del Vittoriano. Giotto and the trecento runs here to 28th June; to be reviewed. Rome, GNAM. The retrospective exhibition of Cy Twombly, previously in London and reviewed in the October issue, runs here to 24th May. Rome, MACRO Future. Futurismo Manifesto 100 x 100 dissects Marinetti’s manifesto, first published in Le Figaro in February 1909; to 17th May. Rome, Musei Capitolini. A monographic show devoted to Fra Angelico; to 5th July; to be reviewed. Rome, Scuderie Papali al Quirinale. The Futurism exhibition, previously in Paris, is on show here to 24th May (then in London); to be reviewed. Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition here explores 19th-century art inspired by Normandy (Fig.92); 16th May to 16th August; to be reviewed. Rovereto, MART. Futurismo 100, reviewed on p.340 above, explores the connections between Italian avant-garde art and that in Russia and Germany in the early 20th century; to 7th June. Rovigo, Palazzo Roverella. Deco: art in Italy 1919–1939 is on view to 28th June. St Etienne, Musée d’art moderne de SainteEtienne. A retrospective of work by the Sarajevoborn artist Braco Dimitrijevic is on view here from 16th May to 16th August. Salzburg, Museum der Moderne. A retrospective of work by Baselitz runs to 21st June. Serra San Quirico, ex-Monastero di S. Lucia. Pasqualino Rossi. La scoperta di un protagonista del Barocco reassembles for the first time the work of this artist (1635–1722); to 13th September; to be reviewed. Siena, S. Maria della Scala. Jenny Holzer’s site-specific video installation is projected onto the external walls of the old hospital; to 24th May. The eye of the archaeologist: Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli in Siena; to 5th July. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. An exhibition devoted to Pre-Raphaelite art includes some 170 works; to 24th May; to be reviewed. Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie. A newly renovated wing of the Museum shows works from 1950 to the present, including, to 7th June, a presentation of German Informel painting from the Museum’s collection. In the Stirling-Halle of the new Museum building, an exhibition of works by the Viennese Actionists is on display to 5th July. Tourcoing, Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition focusing on the Romanian roots of Dada, including works by Marcel Janco, Arthur Segal and Tristan Tzara; to 12th July. Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Mantegna’s S. Zeno predella is reassembled; to 15th June. Turin, Castello di Rivoli. Some eighty works by Thomas Ruff; to 21st June. Turin, Fondazione Merz. Works by Wolfgang Laib and Mario Merz are shown together; to 7th June. Turin, Palazzo Bricherasio. An exhibition devoted to art from the age of Akhenaten runs to 14th June.
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the Neues Museum Weimar and various other locations, to 5th July. Zürich, Kunsthalle. The exhibition Albert von Keller. Salons, Séances, Secession offers a survey of the Munich-based painter; to 4th October. Zürich, Kunsthaus. An exhibition bringing masterpieces of Egyptian art from Berlin, including the bust of Nefertiti, into dialogue with sculptures by Giacometti, is on view here to 24th May; it is reviewed on p.338 above. Installations and sculpture by the Dutch-born artist Mark Manders (b.1968) are on display to 14th June. Zürich, Museum Bellerive. An exhibition of work by the Swiss sculptor Hermann Obrist (1862–1927), a pioneer of Jugendstil while working in Munich around 1900, runs here to 7th June (then in Munich).
New York
92. La Fontaine de la Crosse, Rouen, by John Sell Cotman. 1830. Pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite, 35.9 by 27.1 cm. (British Museum, London; exh. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen). Turin, Palazzo Madama. Baroque Feasts, a loan exhibition of paintings, decorative art and books, celebrates ceremonies and pageants at the court of Savoy between 1500 and 1800; to 5th July. Urbino, Palazzo Ducale. Raphael and Urbino includes paintings and drawings by Raphael, his father and others; to 12th July; to be reviewed. Utrecht, Centraal Museum. An exhibition here explores how the Italian-inspired art of Jan van Scorel, influenced the Northern Renaissance; to 28th June. Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent. Masterly Manuscripts. The Middle Ages in gold and ink is organised in collaboration with the Library of Utrecht University; 16th May to 23rd August. Vienna, Albertina. The Age of Rembrandt is a large survey of 17th-century Dutch works from the permanent collection supplemented by some 40 loans from international collections; to 21st June. Vienna, Belvedere. An exhibition of work by Alphonse Mucha runs here to 1st June (then in Montpellier and Munich). Vienna, Essl Museum. An exhibition of works by Jorn, Appel and Alechinsky, all produced after the years of CoBrA, runs here to 17th May. Vienna, Kunsthalle. An exhibition of work by Thomas Ruff ; 21st May to 13th September. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. An exhibition devoted to the depiction of interiors in paintings spanning 1500 to 1900 from the permanent collection and on loan from Viennese museums constitutes the swansong of the departing director of the picture gallery, Karl Schütz; to 12th July. Vienna, Leopold Museum. An exhibition juxtaposing works by Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz is on display here to 25th May. Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. An exhibition that includes loans explores the history of the picture frame from the late medieval period to the 19th century; 15th May to 12th January 2010. Vienna, MUMOK. An exhibition of paintings made by the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig during her eighties (she is 90 this year) can be seen to 10th May. The Museum is displaying its large collection of early works by Nam June Paik; to 17th May. Three videos and a sculpture by the Polish artist Agnieszka Kalinowska (b.1971) address the subject of asylum seekers; to 14th June. Weimar, Bauhaus Museum. A large exhibition celebrating the Bauhaus is on view here, and at the Goethe-Nationalmuseum, the Schiller-Museum,
Brooklyn Museum. The loan exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Painter from Paris to the Sea, seen previously in Bremen and Ordrupgaard and reviewed on p.344 above, runs here to 5th July. Drawing Center. Works by Unica Zürn (1916–70), the German author and painter associated with Surrealism, are shown alongside documents contextualising her life and work; to 23rd July. Frick Collection. Masterpieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum; to 10th May. Gagosian. At st Street, a large group of important, rarely seen late works by Picasso from the collection of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso is shown alongside loans from public and private collections; to 6th June. At th Street, works by Yayoi Kusama; to 27th June. Guggenheim. The Museum celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition documenting the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright; 15th May to 23rd August. Jewish Museum. The touring exhibition Reclaimed: paintings from the collection of Jacques Goudstikker runs here to 2nd August. The Danube Exodus is a collaboration between the filmmaker Peter Forgács and the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, and incorporates 8mm film footage shot by Captain Nándor Andrésovits, an amateur filmmaker who ferried fleeing refugees to safety along the Danube during the Second World War; to 2nd August. Mary Boone. At Fifth Avenue, Barry Le Va: Hands, Handles, Blades: Cleaver Configurations 1969–2009; at W. th Street, works by Mike Kelly, Terence Koh and Jeff Koons; both to 16th May. Metro Pictures. Works by Robert Longo are on view to 30th May. Metropolitan Museum of Art. An exhibition exploring French bronzes spanning the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, seen earlier in Paris and reviewed in the February issue, runs here to 24th May (then in Los Angeles). Art of the Korean Renaissance 1400–1600; to 21st June. Living Line: Selected Indian Drawings from the Subhash Kapoor Gift; to 6th September. Some 9,000 picture postcards collected by the photographer Walker Evans comprise an exhibition running to 25th May. The exhibition The Pictures Generation explores the work of artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman who work on the border of the fine arts and mass media; to 2nd August. Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, seen previously in London and Madrid and reviewed in the December 2008 issue, runs here from 20th May to 16th August. The many recent acquisitions at the Museum include a drawing by Degas from the Janis H. Levin collection (Fig.93). Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Works by Jessica Stockholder are on view from 7th May to 13th June.
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93. Kneeling dancer, by Edgar Degas. c.1880–85. Pastel on paper laid down on board, 48.9 by 32.4 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Morgan Library & Museum. An exhibition here is devoted to the outstanding 18th- and early 19thcentury oil-sketches in the collection of Eugene V. and Clare Thaw; to 30th August. New at the Morgan: Acquisitions Since 2004; to 18th October. Museum of Modern Art. Seen earlier in Los Angeles, the exhibition Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective is on view here to 11th May, comprising a broad survey of the artist’s work; to be reviewed. Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West shows works from the 1850s to the present day; to 8th June. Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel explores the work of these two Latin American artists whose drawings, sculptures and paintings are contemporary with the birth of Conceptual Art; to 15th June. Neue Galerie. Curated by Reinhold Heller, the exhibition Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin 1905–1913 runs here to the 29th June; it is reviewed on p.342 above. PaceWildenstein. At W. th St., selected paintings and tapestries by Chuck Close are on view to 20th June. At W. nd St., paintings by Alex Katz can be seen to 13th June. P.S. Contemporary Art Center. Sculptural works by Jonathan Horowitz in the manner of Koons are on view here to 14th September. Upper East Side. Under the umbrella of Masterworks of Six Centuries, 9 galleries have mounted exhibitions: Still Lifes of the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries (Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts); Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Carceri, views of Rome, and other subjects (David Tunick, Inc.); Fine American Paintings, Sculpture and Contemporary Art (James Graham & Sons); Lyonel Feininger at the Bauhaus (Moeller Fine Art); Alice Neel. Nudes of the 1930s (Zwirner & Wirth); Master Drawings and Paintings. Recent Acquisitions (Didier Aaron, Inc.); Ray Johnson. . .Dali/Warhol/and others. . .’. . .Main Ray, Ducham, Openheim, Pikabia. . .’ (Richard L. Feigen & Co); British Adventures in France and Italy. Paintings and Drawings 1750–1850 (WS Fine Art Ltd/Andrew Wyld); and Still Life (Dickinson); all 7th May to 30th June.
Baltimore, Walters Art Museum. Prayers in Code is an in-focus show presenting a selection of Books of Hours and explores the artistic patronage at the court of Francis I (1494–1547); to 19th July. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia; to 31st May. Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art. Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective has opened here and occupies almost one acre of specially built walls at the Museum; it runs to 2033. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice runs here to 16th August (then in Paris); to be reviewed. Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The exhibition Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art 1940–1976; to 10th June. Chicago, Art Institute. The new Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano and housing the Museum’s collection of 20th- and 21st-century art, increasing the size of the Institute to make it the second largest art museum in the United States, opens on 16th May. Works by Cy Twombly, 2000–07, comprise an inaugural exhibition running to 13th September. Cleveland Museum of Art. Art and Power in the Central African Savanna; to 31st May. Columbia, Museum of Art. Forty-seven paintings and eleven works on paper drawn from the Davies collection at the National Museum of Wales, includes works by Cézanne, Daumier, Manet, Millet, Pissarro and Van Gogh; to 7th June (then in Oklahoma, Syracuse, Washington and Albuquerque). Columbus, Wexner Centre for the Visual Arts. Works by Robin Rhode and four video installations by William Forsythe are displayed to 26th July. Dallas Museum of Art. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs; to 17th May. Detroit Institute of Arts. The collection-based exhibition Learning by Line: The Role of Drawing in the Eighteenth Century runs to 15th June. Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum. Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, reviewed in the February issue, runs here to 14th June. Greenwich, Bruce Museum. 40 modern sculptures from local private collections, including work by Archipenko, Caro and Koons; to 24th May. Houston, Menil Collection. Seen earlier in New York, the exhibition Marlene Dumas: Measuring your own grave, is on display here to 21st June. Works by John Chamberlain; to 2nd August. Houston, Museum of Fine Arts. Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul; to 17th May. The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500–1825, from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation; to 10th May. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Seen earlier in Baltimore, the retrospective exhibition of work by Franz West runs here to 7th June. Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, seen previously in Washington, runs here from 3rd May to 4th October. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. The collectionbased exhibition German and Central European Manuscript Illumination runs to 24th May. Tales in Sprinkled Gold: Japanese Lacquer for European Collectors centres on the Mazarin Chest (whose restoration was partially funded by the Getty) and the Van Diemen Box, both on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; to 24th May. Work by the photographers Paul Outerbridge and Jo Anne Callis can be seen to 9th August. The exhibition Taking Shape brings together sculpture and furniture from the collections of Temple Newsam (England) and the J. Paul Getty Museum, with a focus on 17th- and 18th-century Baroque and Rococo objects made in England, France and Italy; to 5th July. Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art. The first retrospective of work by Dan Graham in the US runs here to 25th May (then in New York and Minneapolis); to be reviewed.
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center. The Quick and the Dead comprises works by 40 artists from the 1960s and 1970s reflecting on themes of time and space; to 27th September. Paintings by Elizabeth Peyton are on view here to 14th June. Nashville, Frist Center for the Visual Arts. The exhibition Paint made flesh shows paintings made since the 1950s that ‘suggest the carnal properties and cultural significance of human flesh and skin’; to 10th May (then in Washington and Rochester). New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. Picasso and the Allure of Language surveys the relationship between art and literature in Picasso’s work, and between painting and writing; to 24th May. Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada. The international loan exhibition From Raphael to Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome includes some 150 paintings and drawings and runs from 29th May to 7th September. The display reconstructing Veronese’s Petrobelli altarpiece, seen earlier in London, runs here from 29th May to 7th September (then in Blanton). Philadelphia, ICA. The exhibition Dirt on Delight: Impulses that Form Clay examines the use of clay in contemporary sculpture; to 21st June (then in Minneapolis). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Drawn largely from the Museum’s own collection, the exhibition Cézanne and Beyond shows works by the Master of Aix and by those artists who were influenced by him; to 17th May; to be reviewed. Portland Art Museum. La volupté du gout, seen earlier in Tours, looks at French painting in the age of Mme de Pompadour; to 17th May. San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art. The large travelling retrospective of works by the South African artist William Kentridge is on view here to 31st May (then in Fort Worth). Seattle Art Museum. The touring exhibition Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, seen earlier in Louisville, runs here to 25th May (then in Birmingham AL). Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario. Seen previously in Manchester (UK), Sin and Salvation: Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, runs here to 10th May. Tulsa, Philbrook Museum of Art. Seen earlier at Pittsburgh and Evanston, From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci: A Century of Italian Drawings from the Prado, runs here to 5th July. Vancouver Art Gallery. Vermeer, Rembrandt, and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; 10th May to 13th September. Washington, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. The Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in The Moscow Kremlin; 9th May to 13th September. Washington, National Gallery of Art. A monographic show devoted to Luis Meléndez runs here from 17th May to 23rd August (then in Los Angeles and Boston). Washington, National Portrait Gallery. Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture assembles some 100 portraits and self-portraits by the French artist (Fig.94), including works by contemporaries, such as Picabia and Florine Stettheimer, and also the obligatory annexe of contemporary works inspired by Duchamp, from Warhol to Gordon; to 2nd August; catalogue available. Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century; to 16th August. Washington, Phillips Collection. Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life comprises some 45 paintings and a dozen etchings; to 24th May.
Australia Brisbane, Gallery of Modern Art. A tripartite display considering contemporary Chinese art includes a display of work from the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, works by the painter Zhang Xiaogang and photographs by the performance artist William Yang; to 28th June. the burl ingt o n magazin e
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Brisbane, Queensland Gallery of Art. The first exhibition to present a survey of paintings by the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang runs here to 28th June. Melbourne, Heide Museum of Modern Art. Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia traces the impact of Modernism on the country between 1917 and 1967; to 12th July. Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art. A major retrospective of the last 40 years of work by Yayoi Kusama runs here to 8th June.
Asia Beijing, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art. Works by the Thai-born Japanese artist Navin Rawanchaikul are on view here to 13th June. Gurgaon, Devi Art Foundation. The recently opened Foundation, the first museum of contemporary art in India, shows contemporary art from Pakistan; to 31st May. Seoul, Museum of Art. The exhibition Art & Synaesthesia comprises newly commissioned works by 24 artists on the theme of the five senses; to 7th July. Shanghai, Shanghai Museum. Henri Matisse and Lydia Delectorskaya: Works by Matisse from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is on view here to 31st July. 94. Marcel Duchamp, by Richard Hamilton. 1968. Poster, 78.7 by 57.2 cm. (Private collection; exh. National Portrait Gallery, Washington).
May sales London, Bonhams (Bond St.). Japanese art (12th); European ceramics (13th); Chinese art (14th); The Greek sale (19th); Modern and contemporary glass (19th). London, Bonhams (Knightsbridge). Chinese and other Asian works of art (11th); Works of art (12th); Furniture (12th); Modern pictures and illustrations (19th); Portrait miniatures (20th). London, Christie’s (King St.). Irish and sporting art (8th); Chinese ceramics and works of art (12th); Belgravia and Lake Geneva – two European collections (14th); 20th-century British art (21st). London, Christie’s (South Kensington). Maritime art (13th); Japanese art and design (13th); Chinese ceramics, works of art and textiles (15th). London, Sotheby’s (Bond St.). The Greek sale (6th); Sporting and marine art (7th); The Irish sale (7th); Chinese ceramics and works of art (13th); Photographs (19th); 20th-century British art (20th); Genoese silver and furniture from a private Swiss collection (27th); English and Continental furniture, silver, ceramics and clocks (28th). New York, Christie’s. Impressionist and modern art (6th and 7th); Post-War and contemporary art (13th and 14th); American paintings, drawings and sculpture (20th); Objects of vertu, English, Continental and American silver (22nd); Latin American paintings (28th and 29th). New York, Sotheby’s. Prints (1st); Impressionist and modern art (5th and 6th); French furniture and carpets (8th); Contemporary art (12th and 13th); African Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art (15th); American Indian art (20th); American paintings (21st); Latin American art (27th).
Forthcoming Fairs Art Basel. Modern and contemporary art; 10th to 14th June. London, Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair. 11th to 17th June. London, Master Drawings in London. Old Master drawings; 1st to 31st June. London, Olympia Art and Antiques Fair. 4th to 14th June. London Sculpture Week. 12th to 19th June. Madrid, MADRIDFOTO: New International Photography Fair in Spain. 7th to 10th May. New York, The International Fine Art Fair. 1st to 5th May.
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Announcement Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals, a symposium organised by the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Art Reference Library, takes places at the Frick Collection, New York, on 15th and 16th May. The symposium is free but registration is required. For more information or to register, email: centerprograms@frick.org.
Corrections Sarah Whitfield’s article ‘An unpublished letter from William Scott’, in the April 2009 issue, incorrectly states that Fig.36, Portrait of William Scott, by Harry Hicken, and Fig.40, Untitled (Susanna and the elders?), by William Scott, belong to the estate of William Scott. They are in fact both in the estate of Harry Hicken. We apologise to the owner and author.
Notes on contributors Colin Amery is a freelance writer and critic. Until 2008 he was Director of the World Monuments Fund in Britain. His most recent publication is St Petersburg, with Brian Curran. Hugh Belsey is a Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London and is compiling a catalogue of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough. Philippe Bordes is Professor of Art History at the Université Lyon 2 and has been Director of the Department of Studies and Research at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris since October 2007. Along with the art of the French Revolutionary period and of Jacques-Louis David, his research focuses on modes of representation of the family. Roger Cardinal is Emeritus Professor of Literary and Visual Studies at the University of Kent and writes on the literature and art of Surrealism and the early avant-garde. He is also an international authority on Art Brut (Outsider Art). David Carrier is the Champney Family Professor, Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland
Institute of Art. He is currently a Fulbright-Luce lecturer in the Department of Art and Design, Tsinghua University/National Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. John Cherry retired as Keeper of Medieval and Modern Europe at the British Museum, London, in 2002. He writes on medieval seals and goldsmith’s work and is currently researching the Holy Thorn Reliquary in the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum. Peter Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in French studies at the University of Manchester. He is writing a book on Gustave Moreau and history painting. Stephen Duffy is Curator of 19th Century Paintings/Exhibitions Curator at the Wallace Collection, London. He is currently writing a book on the miniatures in the Wallace Collection with Christoph Martin Vogtherr. Morgan Falconer is a critic and journalist and writes regularly for The Times, Art World and Frieze. Richard Green was Curator of York City Art Gallery from 1977 to 2003. As an independent art historian, he is currently cataloguing the British paintings at Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire. Lu Haiping is a doctoral candidate at China Central Acadmey of Fine Arts. Elizabeth Honig is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently writing a book on Jan Brueghel the Elder. Neil Jeffares is an independent art historian. He is the author of the Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, published in 2006, and maintains the online edition at www.pastellists.com. Felix Krämer is Head of Painting and Sculpture 19th Century and Modern Art at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. He is currently preparing an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner retrospective to be held at the Museum in April 2010. Simon Kelly is Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. His book, Untamed: The Art of Antoine-Louis Barye, co-authored with William Johnston, was published in 2006. Richard Kendall is Curator-at-Large at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown MA. He is currently co-curating an exhibition on the importance of Degas’s work for Picasso, which opens at the Clark in June 2010 and will be shown subsequently at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona. John P. Lambertson is Associate Professor and Edith M. Kelso Chair of Art History at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. He is currently writing a book on French Romantic painting, politics and popular culture during the Bourbon Restoration. Silvia Loreti is an independent art historian. Chris Michaelides is Curator, European Collections at the British Library, London. He was one of the curators of Breaking the rules: the printed face of the European Avant Garde, 1900–1937. Christoph Martin Vogtherr is Curator of 19th Century Paintings/Exhibitions Curator at the Wallace Collection, London. He is currently writing a book on the miniatures in the Wallace Collection with Stephen Duffy. Rachel Sloan is 2009–10 graduate intern in the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. She is currently working on a study of word and image in the prints of Maurice Denis. Jon Whiteley is Senior Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Art in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He has recently published a handlist of the stringed instruments in the Ashmolean and is now working on a catalogue of the later French paintings. Anne T. Woollett is Associate Curator in the Department of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Richard Wrigley is Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham. He is currently writing a book on representations of Rome. Martin Wyld is Director of Conservation at the National Gallery, London.
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MONTGOMERY GALLERY AmericAn And europeAn 19th And 20th century Works of Art With A speciAl focus on the Art of cAliforniA
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)
Portrait de Femme Circa 1816, Rome. Signed lower right: Ingres Graphite on paper, 21.5 x 16.5 cm (81/2 x 61/2 inches)
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