Art: Miserable Nudes

Long dominated by a handful of aging masters, French artists have been increasingly aware, lately, of a young master now dead. Francis Gruber was only 36 when he died of asthma and T.B. in 1948; his Montparnasse friends remember him as an overpowering gay blade who talked, drank and painted at a furious clip and did all three magnificently. His paintings, on show in a Paris gallery last week, were sad and bony as a squirrel in March—cold and sometimes acid in color, scalpel-sharp in line. They consisted mostly of hollow-chested nudes, their breasts pinched with cold, whose bones and muscles were as clearly delineated as in anatomical drawings and whose eyes were black and full of misery. His landscapes, too, had a withered look. “The sun in Gruber’s sky,” one critic wrote, “is never warm enough to take away the goose flesh.”

Gruber’s father, a famed stained-glass maker of Alsace, encouraged him to draw but refused to let him have his paints in the afternoons unless his morning drawing lessons went well. Under such discipline, Francis Gruber grew up to be one of the finest draftsmen of his generation, though his lines almost never described round, soft shapes. Hard, mean, digging, they hinted constantly at the pain that plagued him. His death meant the disappearance, wrote Paris Critic Waldemar George, of “the only painter who was capable of giving to French art a sense of … the human values. Our only consolation is to know that his teaching will not be lost. In the end, the young will owe him much.”

George neglected to say what France’s young painters would eventually learn from Gruber. Most of them are still experimenting with Picasso’s big, free, arbitrarily distorted forms and Matisse’s arbitrarily souped-up colors. They were not yet inclined, apparently, to follow Gruber’s grimmer, narrower path.

If Gruber had any one thing to teach, it was the value of a return to the 15th and 16th Century German masters he himself most admired: Matthias Grünewald, Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer. Their art had been as strictly delineated, and often as sad and bitter cold as his, though far more ambitious. Had he lived, Gruber might conceivably have come to paint a Crucifixion as great as Grünewald’s. He never got beyond showing how pathetic a nude model and how forbidding a winter landscape can look.