Art: Before Your Very Eyes

Here was lust and love, birth and creation, hell and despair; and each emotion showed not only on the faces but in every muscle of each arm and leg. The portrait busts seemed timeless, as if the sculptor knew no theme that was not eternal. The Auguste Rodin show at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art was near perfection—the superb work of a giant superbly installed. The public responded by joyously wallowing in the incredible vitality of bronze and stone bursting with life, of figures that writhed, embraced and entwined themselves. The critics were all superlatives, but the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke summed up the show best, though he spoke 50 years ago. “To create an image,” he said, “meant to Rodin to seek eternity in a countenance. Rodin’s conception of art was not to beautify but to separate the lasting from the transitory.”

To the avant-garde of 20 years ago, Rodin was an overwrought sentimentalist. The great cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (whose own retrospective is finishing a nationwide tour) ruefully recalls how appalled he was when someone told him that old Rodin had liked a Lipchitz sculpture. “What could be so wrong with my little sculpture that Rodin liked it?” he asked. But Lipchitz came to realize that though Rodin dealt with the human figure, he was breaking it down, exploring form, probing its mysteries much as the cubists were. Rodin’s Walking Man, thought to be a study for one of the six figures in The Burghers of Calais or for St. John the Baptist Preaching, seems to stride by before the viewer’s eye. Said Rodin: “The human body is a temple that marches. It is a moving architecture.”

It is the happy duty of the museum to stand guard over the whole history of art and to make certain that what is good is never too long neglected. To an extent, the Museum of Modern Art and its excellent catalogue have performed this service for Rodin. The show that opened last week firmly established him as the father of modern sculpture, an artist who gave new movement to static form.

The Great Propagators. By the thousands people came—upper Madison Avenue ladies interestedly peering at The Kiss, a beatnik who had to see the show even if it meant lugging the baby uptown, suburban matrons intelligently relating Rodin to the Greeks. Until modern times, only a tiny proportion of humanity ever looked at art, and even they were confined to what was close at hand. Now museums more than ever search out the treasures of the world, hidden in private collections, ancient temples, obscure monasteries, half-forgotten castles. They gather the works of one man or one school from all over the world to be judged anew. They send their vast and learned exhibitions traveling across oceans and continents; they are the great conservators, but also the great propagators. Even commercial galleries, seeking prestige, increasingly put on theme shows of not-for-sale work, old or new. If their exhibitions do not happen to stop near by, the art lover need not feel deprived. By jet and superhighway, it would be possible for one man to see all the major exhibitions open this week in the U.S. and Europe before any of them closes. Or he can, as ever, take advantage of the thesis of Andre Malraux: that the camera and advanced techniques of color reproduction can transform man’s mind into a “museum without walls,” in which the whole sweep of art is on permanent display (see the next dozen pages).

The current exhibitions are not intentionally related; yet they all seem like instruments—some reedy, some pure, some weak, some strong—of a single symphony. In Buffalo last week, two galleries paid homage to Local Boy Charles Burchfield on his 70th anniversary, while France was paying homage to Eugène Delacroix on the 100th anniversary of his death. At one Burchfield opening, 700 admirers crowded about their hero to wish him well; in Paris, the air was filled with talk of Delacroix—the huge show coming at the Louvre, the appetizer exhibitions now on view in Paris and Bordeaux, the new study of Delacroix just published by Hachette. Burchfield has an enormously appealing talent that will not influence the course of art one bit; Delacroix was a genius, the leader of the romantics. One charms, the other hypnotizes; both delight—and each generates that special kind of excitement that an artist can cast and no one else.

Majesty & Sordidness. In Richmond, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is brilliantly performing the role of reappraiser for the art of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 451 paintings and drawings, ranging from family portraits to animal studies to magnificent sea and landscapes, are from the collection of Paul Mellon, new president of the National Gallery. A longtime collector of British painting, Mellon acquired most of the works in the show in the past three years, picking them up not only at auctions but directly from the owners of England’s stately homes, to which his wide acquaintanceship in British society gave him access. He sprang the collection on the art world as a stunning fait accompli, and museums everywhere are now vying to show it; Virginia got it first because Mellon is a trustee of the museum and a Virginia resident. The show opened with a banquet for the museum’s Collectors’ Circle, and the public has been flocking to it since at a rate of 1,400 a day.

The English painters as a whole may not have been after universal themes; but they caught an age for all time, with all its grace and majesty and the sordidness that lay beneath. A Constable landscape may be a vast vista of perfect peace; but Hogarth is not far behind to remind one, like a conscience, that art must also deal with filth, poverty and disease. The Mellon collection gives a fresh view of a time of stunning versatility and charm. To the English, art was a craft to be perfected with loving care, and the grace note was often as important as the thundering chord. Yet, when no longer seen through the haze of Victorian valentines that followed it, the age is shown as robust and meaty, not a time of pallid sentiment but of potency and health.

The greatest of the 19th century masters was Joseph Mallord William Turner. He studied nature for mood, and he was probably at his best when the mood was ugly. His Harlech Castle is filled with menace, and in his later work, he could whip up the sea to a point that the rage of nature—painted with sponge, knife, finger, or even bits of bread—drowned form in a mist of abstraction.

An Ageless Ornament. In Paris, too, an attempt at rehabilitation is going on. The painter Giovanni Boldini came to Paris in 1872 from his native Italy, where his father made quite a good living faking Guardis and Mantegnas. To this unusual but effective grounding in the old masters, Boldini added a talent for portraiture, and soon all of high society was knocking at his studio. When Paris opened its current retrospective of nearly 300 works, Jean Cocteau made a strained effort to rank Boldini as a precursor of Giacometti and Georges Mathieu. But turning Boldini into a “modern” is beside the point. His Comtesse de Leusse is an ageless ornament that might have adorned the imperial court of Rome, a palazzo of Renaissance Italy, or Buckingham Palace today. Only her clothes freeze her in time.

Boldini died in 1931 at the age of 88, blandly unaffected by the storms that had rent the art world since the century began. Among the storms was the “Blue Rider” group, which Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded in 1911. They extended their hands to all modern artists whose art followed no particular line, but grew “out of inner necessity.” As a result, they became associated with all the master rebels of their day—men who were churning up the rules of perspective, blasting out the innards of form, melting down the image to unrecognizable shapes. Manhattan’s Leonard Hutton Galleries has restaged those days when the manifesto in capital letters was a standard prop of the art world.

Kandinsky’s place as a founder of modern abstraction is obvious. No one knows what the extent of Marc’s influence might have been had he not been killed at the age of 36 in World War I. His first paintings were based on the theme of the animal in harmony with all creation. He later arranged idealized shapes of pure color in such a way that each canvas seemed to have its own jagged rhythm. But what he left behind was more than a technical achievement; it was an enchanted world, half sophisticated, half childlike, of animals colored like toys in a nursery wonderland where pears could be bigger than cows. Marc commandeered nature’s forms, transformed them as he saw fit, and then rebuilt nature any way he wanted.

Bitter Footnote. The art world of Europe was a rambunctious place, and when it crossed the Atlantic to join the Armory Show of 1913, it drowned out whatever noise the Americans were making. Yet this week, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington has a well-thought-out show to prove that Americans had plenty of vitality between 1900 and 1940. There were the new open sculptures of Archipenko, the mobiles of Calder, the precisionism of Charles Sheeler, the cubism of Max Weber, and the soaring abstractions of Joseph Stella. But the case of Stanton Macdonald-Wright was something else again, one of those bitter little footnotes to the history of art that serve as a reminder that experimentation and progress are not necessarily the same thing.

The public has an appetite for art that is international, catholic, apparently insatiable, and much more mature than it was a few decades ago. When 150-year-old Colby College in little (pop. 18,000) Waterville, Me., celebrated its centennial, it staged a pageant of eleven scenes, including “The Baptist Ideal,” “The Spirit of 1861.” and “Sam, a Freed Slave,” a tribute to the janitor. In 1963, the idea that came instantly to mind for the sesquicentennial was to put on an exhibition that would demonstrate the role of Maine in the history of U.S. art.

Cruel Coasts. The show—and a complementary book called Maine and Its Role in American Art, 1740-1963 (Viking; $10) —raises doubt that the nation’s art could have survived without the help of that state. From Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley to John Singer Sargent and George Bellows, from Maurice Prendergast and Childe Hassam to Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper, from Winslow Homer to John Marin to Andrew Wyeth—artists have taken inspiration from its cruel coasts and rugged landscapes. Marsden Hartley lived there and found his own rough-hewn style admirably suited to it. He saw no refinement, only a primeval bluntness in Maine’s rocks, mountains and shore lines. These he painted with a kind of primitive expressionism, for “nativeness is built of such primitive things.”

Nativeness, and other kinds of representation, are far and away the people’s choice in art, but abstraction has an undying fascination in shows like the Philip Guston retrospective. To see it is to sweat out a painful development: every step that Guston took throughout his professional life involved agonizing doubts and self-reappraisals. Perhaps as a result, his canvases have a feverish, almost tentative look; yet this very nervousness is also their virtue. They give his forms, built up of tiny strokes, a quivering inner life. Compared with Guston, Ben Nicholson’s mentholated abstractions are the essence of serenity—simple forms resting gently on planes of fragile color.

Exotic and Erotic. Throughout the history of art there have been such painters of intellect, but there have always been, too, those who paint only with passion. Had Delacroix not been the illegitimate son of the influential Talleyrand, he might not have had so easy a time getting his work shown, and even so, he shocked as well as awed. Battles intrigued him, massacres fascinated him, the combination of blood and splendor, of luxury and pain, seemed to inspire him. In his mind, he traveled over India and the Near East, filling it full of glittering jewels, gilded swords, muscular slaves, milk-skinned concubines. He was one of the great melodramatists of all time, and his melodramas were always superb. His Sardanapalus was inspired by reading a dramatic poem by Lord Byron, and the picture he painted has the impact of an orgy. The figures are so arranged, in an almost circular composition, that they seem to swirl and dance, much like the flames that will soon over take them. This is romanticism at the boiling point—an extraordinary mixture of the exotic and erotic, a masterpiece so filled with the thrill of the sadist that, as he grew older, Delacroix himself became reluctant to even mention it.

“That which is most real to me,” said Delacroix, “is the illusions that I create with my work. The rest is shifting sand.” Each artist has his own vision, and part of it is left with those who will stop to share it. But in the best of the shows of May 1963, there is something in common: the “inner necessity” of which the Blue Rider movement spoke, combined with a sense of interdependence. From ancient Greece to Rodin to Lipchitz is a distant course but logical. From the lushness of Delacroix to the colored orchestrations of the Fauves is hardly a giant leap; and the abstract expressionists have claimed Turner as a father. In this one week, the world’s walled museums are helping to build Malraux’s museum without walls by bringing to millions at firsthand a cross section, however fortuitous, of the history of the last two centuries of art, and thus expose the ordeal of the artist himself. For the artist, said Rodin, “it is not thinking with the primitive ingenuity of childhood that is most difficult, but to think with tradition, with its acquired force, and with all the accumulated wealth of its thought.”