David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France, Drawings from the Louvre. At the Morgan Library, NYC

The Morgan, Part I.

In the catalogue introduction to the exhibition Louis-Antoine Prat, curator in the graphic arts department of the Louvre, describes the thinking that resulted in the selection of the chosen art works: by framing it within the years 1795 to 1850 both the extended turmoil within the French state and the wide range of drawing styles would be included illustrating the many interests in the French graphic arts. And it appears that the intentions have been successfully realized. There are a variety of schools and genres …classicism, romanticism, troubadour, genre, figure drawings, portraits, landscapes and cityscapes representing 19^th Century French artists from David to Daumier. There are drawings in graphite, chalk, charcoal, pen and ink, wash, and watercolor. The only thing that I notice missing is that there is no still life and no works in pastel. With only the slightest forcing of the dates that omission might have been corrected by including something by Chardin…he overlapped the era by three years. But that might be a subjective desire on my part: I am a fool for Chardin.

As for the drawings there is a full range from doodles to quick sketches and sketch book works made in situ  to gesture drawings, contour drawings, layouts for larger works, finished drawings for larger works, and drawings intended as art works that stand on their own. Some of these have interests as drawings and some of them have interest as curiosities: I had no idea that David could work on such a small scale!

Regarding the quality many of them are superb, many of them are very good, some are historically interesting but mediocre and only a few of them are questionable as “art”, notably the Sappho Leaping into the Sea by Chasseriau: whatever its historic importance it is the kind of bad drawing that I would expect to see only in an exhibition of works by high school students. The inclusion of drawings like this makes one wonder if the Louvre might have a very limited collection of drawings.

By contrast Paul Gravarni’s Interior View of a Courtyard at five by three inches, despite having what the catalogue describes as a lack of finesse, makes one wonder whatever became of him. It is a very tight value study in grisaille similar to the works of Charles Sheeler made from his photographs.

Among the pleasant discoveries is an intriguing female nude by Corot. One often forgets that many of Corot’s landscapes feature dancing nymphs…a fact I often do try to forget. In addition the watercolor and gouache, Two Leopards from Peru, by Barye is equally delightful, as his works always are…nobody does better beasts.

In the realm of showstoppers there are of course the usual suspects; Gericault, Delacroix, David, all of whose works here are truly inspiring, and, of course, Ingres. And with ten works in this exhibition and sixteen from the Morgan collection in a second exhibition down the hall a wonderful range of Ingres’ work gets a more than welcome showing. (That entry follows this.)

But the star of the show, as he would be in any exhibition that included his works on paper, is Prud’hon with two nudes, one male and one female, a portrait, a working drawing squared up for a painting, and a small and overly maudlin illustration with watercolor. Prud’hon is one of the few artists whose every nude can stop me dead in my tracks. They are not drawings so much as they are modeled forms seemingly sculpted on the flat surface and with the most exquisite sense of lighting. Encompassed by caressing air they are all romantic soft edges and seem to conform to Kenneth Clark’s statement that every nude should evoke a sexual response and indeed, whether male or female, these do.

But the great work here is his portrait of Constance Mayer, black and white chalk. Here is one of those rare portraits, Picasso’s portraits of Marie Therese are similar, in which the artist is able to express his love for both the subject and the medium in which he works. Because of that love Prud’hon is able to communicate her unique individuality, yet he captures as well her archetypal essence: while she is his Constance she is as well someone we could know and love in our own time: the lighting is beautiful, the range of tonal values is perfection, the execution is flawless. And I love that she is not in an environment but that she is a drawing on paper. It is all so fragile: not the drawing alone, but life …life is fragile. The juxtaposition of controlled mastery and spontaneous delight has never been better essayed.

This is a lovely exhibition: it is the kind of work I would expect museums to always have on view but which they do not. Because the subject matter is almost always on the human scale I was aware of liking it so much more than I do exhibitions of Italian Renaissance drawing. However, I went through it twice and I left both times feeling that it was not quite enough, that I wanted it to be more than it was. I don’t mean by that more drawings, the 60 here and the additional 16 Ingres drawings are just right for one museum visit. Perhaps it was the inclusion of so many of the lesser known artist of the era, who I agree are due their few moments of recognition if not fame, but who had the character here of being merely filler. Perhaps their appeal is to those scholars who dote on these things…and who too often make verbal mountains of erudition out of molehills of achievement. In the end, for me, there was a feeling of thinness to it. But maybe the fault is mine: perhaps I spend too much time looking at art simply for the pleasure of it. Is that possible?

Here is a link to the web site. Unfortunately there is no online slide show:

http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=49

The catalogue is all inclusive and the reproductions are splendid. There is, however, practically no commentary on the various mediums or the techniques they require. My thoughts on that are included in the comments on the Ingres exhibition.

Ingres at the Morgan. The Morgan Library and Museum, NYC.

The Morgan: Part II.

The claim is often made that American museums are teaching institutions and with their lectures and talks that accompany each of their special exhibitions that can be understood as a somewhat apt description. Unfortunately those talks and lectures are too often only anecdotal material about the artist or his models. Very few museums in either their lectures or their catalogues discuss at length or in detail an artist’s technique or his method of using the various media. (That is regrettable as an artist is a master of his craft before he can be a fine artist.) I often find that much more could be done in this area to inform the general public and to make the public more curious than it presents itself as being, thereby increasing its knowledge and further whetting its appetite for the fine arts in general. As I have said many times before; we have fine arts institutions in this country but we do not have a fine arts culture. By giving us only cursory information, museums are partially to blame for that.

This small exhibition is an excellent example of my meaning. According to the web site there is only one scheduled gallery talk. That’s a real shame. But there is a greater missed opportunity: several letters written by Ingres are displayed in the center vitrine. As the print is so small as to be illegible and because Ingres is not regarded as a man of “letters” I think a far more valuable set of information could have been provided elucidating the term: “Graphite”.

All but one of these sixteen drawings are designated as Graphite and ten of them are portraits using the full or three quarter figure. Each of these is a contour drawing in which the edges of forms are recorded at the point where they recede from the eye. Each contour line is reported with great specificity. Each carefully made line has the same width, weight, and tonal value as all of the other lines. It is only in the faces that stumping has been employed to suggest highlight and shadow so that only the faces create the perception of dimensional form. There is no shadowing around the figures to suggest that they are standing out from or sinking into the surface of the paper: these drawings are very specifically on the surface. (I love the existential clarity of that.) Each of these was intended as a finished art work and they are the kind of portraits that were made passé by the invention of photography. They are as well the works that inspired both Matisse and Picasso, both of whom created finished works in a similar linear method. But in the case of Picasso his linear drawings are often denoted as “Pencil”.

In 1560 deposits of the finest grade of European graphite was found in Cumberland England. Slowly it made its way through Europe into the artists’ tool boxes, eventually replacing silver or other metal points. However, with the constant warfare between States, this material was often difficult to obtain. In 1795, the Frenchman, M. Conte, formulated controlled blends of materials and invented the Conte pencil. By the time Ingres began his career there were many superb drawings in this new medium.

Because I study art and because I draw I avail myself of books that discuss the artists and their materials and so I somewhat know the history of graphite. My comments arise because when I am in galleries I hear one woman say to her companion: “What is graphite?” To which I hear the reply: “I don’t know, but these look like they were made with a pencil.” To them, as to most people, a pencil in whatever form is a “lead” pencil. Not to make too fine a point of it, I think if museum goers had a better understanding of materials and their history it would enhance the point of view of the curators: in this instance, this period in France could be understood to be both revolutionary and evolutionary and that art and history have many affinities. As a further example, on a visit to a gallery showing Picasso’s prints I overheard one woman asking her friend why Picasso was conferring, as the photograph showed us, with “the printer…” “I guess,” her friend replied, “Picasso didn’t know how to run the machines…he was just an artist.” Now that is just ignorance and there is no excuse for that …on the part of teaching institutions.

The technical questions this exhibition raises are these: did Ingres use a wooden pencil as we know it or did he use what we call a mechanical pencil. If he used a wooden pencil I think he would have had to sharpen his point after every line had been made in order to control the uniformity of the lines. With a mechanical pencil with a specific grade of material, hard to soft, and a variety of diameters in the various rods, less sharpening would have been required had the stylist been held in the same way for the whole making of the drawing. Knowing the exact marking device  he used would tell us about the speed at which he worked, just as the size of the format has to do with the place where he worked …in his lap or at his table. Knowing the nature of the craft he had to master would enhance the appreciation of these drawings and we want to know that because he is so present in the making of these drawings.

As it stands they look as if they had simply been gently laid down onto the paper. As a connoisseur and a would-be fellow artist my question is this: How did he do that!

All of the art works in this exhibition are on view on the museum web site and so I see no reason to comment on any but one of them individually. I can report that all of Ingres drawings are perfectly centered on the pages, (I don’t know if that was on purpose or if the paper was trimmed once the drawing was completed), but as all of the figures are drawn to the same scale, I assume that they were specifically placed on the sheet…and well placed they are. When you first see them on the web site they look extremely pale as if overexposed but if you zoom in to see details there is truer representation of their tonal values.

But I do want to comment about the drawing Odalisque and Slave. At 13 by 18 inches and rendered in graphite, black and white chalk, and with gray and brown wash, this work appears at first as if it were an example of photo realism if not a photograph. This is enhanced because there are no drawn lines in this work; the only lines are the direction of the dynamics and the implied axis of the various planes. Yet on closer inspection it can be seen that it is indeed a drawing. That difference is worthy of contemplation: because everything is so perfectly rendered, what about it makes it different from a photograph?

Seeing this drawing brought to my mind a number of questions about photography and drawings. Were the original photographs in black and white because the film could only record the tonal values of the light striking the plate or were they made black and white specifically to suggest drawings such as this one. For instance, in his earliest explorations Fox Talbot attempted to print photographs with inks creating in essence a new drawing medium. Color photography was available in the early 1900’s but was rarely employed by photographers until much later.

But, further, how is it that drawings in black and white, such as this one, and photographs when they first appeared, were so acceptable to the public that saw the world around them in color? Why is it that some movie buffs prefer films in black and white as being more “real”? I wondered if it might have to do with the insight of psychologists that we do not dream in color. Is an art work analogous to a dream, to those strong, sudden images that command our attention? If so that might then explain our acceptance of oil paintings in which the skin tones are rarely flesh colored but rendered instead in the color key of the whole painting. Finally, is it because when we look at fine art works we do not expect to see “reality”, as if we were looking through a window, but rather that we expect an interpretation of the physical world made an aesthetic distance away from us? Is that an inherently human understanding of art works, of made “pictures”, or have we learned that over the generations? (Perhaps I should reread Suzanne Langer’s writings on art as symbolic experience.)

But perhaps it is not the starkness of the image but the content that suggests the image as the dream. Confronting us is a sensuous, sexually available female, a maid lost in song, a guard/eunuch whose attention as well is elsewhere, and an implied observer whose helmet is sitting at the woman’s feet. It is common, I suspect, to regard something like this as merely a bizarre example of a la mode orientalism of the day. But generations of artists have been compelled to repeat and to reinterpret this situation and this pose. Which aspect of this drawing, the subject or the technique, has the stronger impact on us and gives it its dream state?

Ingres’ work is very tight, remarkably tight. And I was reminded here of a time in one of my art classes when the exasperated instructor shook his head and said to me: “We all know that you can work tight: we are waiting to see if you are going to step into the 20^th Century someday soon and draw loose.” Well, eventually I did, but my true inclination and admiration is always for the way of Ingres. And in that way I am very much like Picasso.  …and, yes, in only that way!!

The Morgan web page:

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/ingres/drawing.asp?page=15

Whenever I visit the Met Museum I always take a few minutes to look at this Ingres painting. Again, it appears to be a photograph but it is indeed a painting. It is flawless; it inspires me and intimidates me at the same time. In the best Aristotelian understanding it inspires terror and awe.

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/150000154?rpp=20&pg=2&ft=*&who=Jean-Auguste-Dominique+Ingres&pos=39

Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore, at the Jewish Museum, NYC.

For the past several years I have been wanting to go down to Baltimore to see the Cone Collection. Having been to Baltimore about thirty years ago, the thought of returning is still not inspiring. Baltimore seems to me always to have been one of those large, congested, and characterless areas with nothing to recommend it and nothing that I have read about it since being there has changed my mind. Imagine my delight when I read that selections from the Cone Collection were to be shown at this museum in NYC.

However, now that I have seen them, I am rather glad that I saved myself the trouble of going all the way to Baltimore. I am fascinated by collections and always try to discern the central interest that has motivated the collector. I know that the Sisters made an annual jaunt to Paris where they fell under the mystique of the Stein siblings and that they bought what interested them but, from this sample of the collection, I sense without much input from the Steins. The bulk of the collection is Matisse/Picasso and there is a real sense in the works purchased that they were selected based on a mercantile mind set: “Let us have six of these and four of those, but in red rather than blue.” There is a real sense that these drawings and paintings were amassed by someone who might have known what they liked but who knew little about the arts.

Most of the works shown here are from the artists’ early years, when the buying was affordable by just about anyone, and most of it, I regret to say, looks like student work. For example: there is a drawing of Fernande, possibly in Gosol, which is a rather murky representational drawing. The Cone sisters knew Fernande and so I think I understand the charm for them of this drawing: they bought a souvenir of a friend signed by an up and coming young artist but a drawing not necessarily a good art work. It in no way has the intrigue and excitement of the early cubist drawing of Fernande, from approximately the same time, that Alfred Stieglitz gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There is a variation here of the well known Matisse drawing of the young woman in the plumed hat, but this variation is interesting only because it has obvious erasures, false starts, and searching contour lines. Whereas we have always been asked to believe that in his Ingres mode Matisse was infallible with his marking device, here we see that we have been misinformed. He was human after all.

Of the paintings the most interesting, by these two artists, is a blue period portrait by Picasso. And while it is a rather straight forward and sort of dull effort, it would fit nicely into an exhibition of Picasso’s Blue Period. More about Matisse after this…

The most interesting and professional works here are the oil paintings by Courbet, Pissarro, Gaughan, and Van Gogh. The latter was done early in his stay in Arles and it shows him working in the technique that was to erupt with the energy of a furious storm in his last years. But in this painting the areas are calm and clearly delineated, the colors are flat and the heavy brush work over the flat areas of color indicates contours and energy. Everything in this painting is controlled and deliberate. We can also see the strong influence of the Japanese wood cuts that were so inspiring in those days: this looks almost like a woodcut in oils with brush work emphasizing the impasto replacing the gouge marks of the carving tool. While it is an interesting painting I suspect it is probably a very valuable painting because it shows so clearly the influences and the growth of his experimentation and the birth of the technique.

The best in show is the Courbet. It displays a facile mastery of craft and has an authentic expression of the sentiments achieving the stature of fine art. Courbet is one of those often considered an also ran painter but the more I see of his work the more I am convinced that he is an undiscovered genius lurking in the shadows…like Tintoretto. Should I live long enough I might become better acquainted with those two.

There are shown as well three beautiful sets of jewelry and some really gorgeous antique fabrics. If I ever decide to go to Baltimore to see more of this collection likely it will be because of these beautiful objects. I‘d always like to see more of this kind of thing and it was an absolute delight to discover them here.

Matisse.

Back in the late eighties when I began to more seriously study modern art I was very enamored of the work of Matisse, more so than I was of Picasso’s work. Most of it I saw in reproductions on heavy, glazed paper in either art books or museum calendars and in such a slick, commercial presentation likely anyone would find himself enamored. However: there is a great difference between those reproductions and the actual paintings. The paintings look flat, whereas the reproductions are juicy, and the colors dull whereas in the books they are brilliant.

I have noticed on several occasions that there are various differences between paintings and their reproductions. The paintings of

Fitz Hugh Lane

are hardly different from one to the other media: they are about the same size and both have a nicely varnished and or glazed finish. Claude of Lorrain, on the other hand, can only be appreciated face to face: his paintings are larger than any reproduction suggests and the accumulated effect of size, color, composition and finish create both a visceral and an emotion response that one would not expect having seen only the prints.

As to why Matisse’s work is so different face to face I think I would have to say because of the finish. Most are not varnished, most were intended, I suspect, to look as if the artist had just left the easel …but 100 years later they look not “just completed” but dulled with age. One of the strongest attractions for me of any painting is its olio resinous impasto, the visceral experience of its presence. Sadly, in the Matisse paintings that quality is now completely missing if in fact it ever existed…he painted very thinly. And so we are left with merely the concept of the painting.

As for the concept, which is a perfectly good offering for an artist to make, in the case of Matisse its repetition wears thin after a while. His work falls into the early works which are a journeyman effort and fine for what they are, the period of Les Fauves when the palette erupted in a riot of color, and then his early experimentations with color and composition which resulted in some very good early modern art works, most of which are at the Museum of Modern Art. Then there were the very late papiers colles. What I find interminable is the long thirty year period between the great early paintings and the papiers colles when he sat in Nice painting odalisque after odalisque. There is one odalisque in this exhibition and it is dull with age, flat, the concept stated but the brush work sloppy and hastily done and if I never see another of these I think I could live happily ever after.

We are also shown an early female nude, the one which he reworked some twenty six times carefully photographing each variation. (As favored collectors the photographs were given to the Cone Sisters who of course bought the painting.) I was especially anxious to see this but was turned away by it because of its slap dash and poorly executed finish: it is a concept and only a concept, an oil sketch, which, had there been a finished painting, might have had some interest for me. Instead, I am further turned away from his work on the whole. As it is, its only interest is that the unintended abstract expressionist quality of the loose painting came to its fall development twenty years later when William de Kooning did his Woman series.

The only work I actually delighted in seeing was a large pen and ink drawing of a woman leaning against some cushions. I have a reproduction of this work which I bought at a local auction years ago and I have always assumed that it was a reproduction from a series of lithographs he did in 1936 where he drew directly on the stone. However: I think I prefer my reproduction. In it every line has the same weight and there is a crispness of the black over the white paper. In the drawing the pen is loaded and moved across the paper until the pen is dry and then reloaded. Thus there are thick and thin lines and blacks and grays but they are by chance and without emphasis as it relates to the subject. Whereas in my reproduction the subject can be approached and communicated with, in the original one confronts a calligraphic tangle of lines strong and weak. I don’t know that I think that was the artist’s intention.

There are as well a number of small sculptures of the female figure but alas I am tone deaf when it comes to sculpture: I don’t know why anyone makes it and I don’t know why anyone would want to look at it. I gave them some attention but I remained indifferent.

For years after their deaths there was an ongoing art world dialogue in which it was asked: who was the greatest painter of the twentieth century: Picasso or Matisse. At different times I have sided with one and then the other. But when I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art some years ago and saw the title of their permanent collection: From Matisse to the Present, I realized at once that with Matisse we have some very pretty paintings but without Picasso there is no modern art. I had a very similar response to the title of this exhibition: Matisse and Modern Masters. Matisse has had his influence and there are painters who owe him a debt but most of those painters are not of the first rank whereas those who saw Picasso’s work and who studied his cubism and his drawing and his application of paint to surface have created the main body of subsequent modern art.

The more I see of Picasso’s work the better I understand that he was a creative force without equal in not only the twentieth century but in the whole of western, or even world, art. The more I see of Matisse’s work the more I sense that he was merely a bourgeoisie with a hobby. While this exhibition is light on Picasso, it strengthens that understanding of Matisse. As this is only a small sample of the larger collection, perhaps, if I ever brave another visit to Baltimore, I might again change my mind. It is indeed a shame to waste a human mind but an even great shame to never change it.

The Jewish Museum page:

http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/conecollection

The Cone Collection, Baltimore:

http://www.artbma.org/collection/overview/cone.html