Painting: Rediscovered Riches

Nineteenth century French painting has never fitted neatly into art historians’ annals. It was a century of variety and contradictions, blessed with an embarrassment of riches. Every decade had its transcendent master—David, Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Corot, Manet, Cézanne—whose force of personality outshone multitudes of minor but thoroughly accomplished painters. One artistic ism followed another, as Neo-classicism yielded to Romanticism, Realism to Impressionism.

All this is reflected in a sumptuous summer-long exhibition entitled “The Past Rediscovered: French Painting 1800-1900” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The show provides a rare opportunity for reacquaintance and reassessment (see color). Paintings by both major and minor figures, including seven loaned by the Louvre, have been arranged in chronological sequence, thereby skillfully re-creating a vigorous esthetic dialogue reflected on canvas.

Dance of Counterparts. “For most people,” says Curator Samuel Sachs II, who organized the exhibition, “the century begins in 1870 with the Impressionists.” In reality, as his show demonstrates, it began in 1789 with the French Revolution, which sundered the economic and social structure that had given baroque culture its unity. The pent-up forces of individualism that were released found a counterpart in a new esthetic freedom that, with the Impressionists, would climax in a complete shattering of form and balance.

Overwhelmed by the turbulent revolution, some painters found relief in a nostalgic sense of the past. The idealism of Hellenism served to mirror the heroics of Napoleon. And in recognizing contemporary figures as viable subjects, painters became aware that a struggling peasant could also have a kind of nobility. Travels to exotic cities in North Africa and the Orient also opened painters’ eyes to the inimitable charms of the French landscape. Thus, a century that opened extolling antiquity as subject matter ended in exalting personal visual experience. Painting for a patron was replaced by painting purely for its own sake.

The first round in this esthetic debate belongs rightfully to Jacques-Louis David, whose painting is displayed in the exhibition alongside that of five of his pupils. An active revolutionary who later wielded tremendous power as official painter to Napoleon, a classicist able to bend Greco-Roman ideals to the service of French patriotism, David embodied the contradictions of the century. More important, his gruesomely vivid portrait of the assassinated revolutionist Jean-Paul Marat dying in a bathtub established him as the first artist to make painting relevant to real and immediate events destined for history. “The father of the entire modern school,” Delacroix called him.

Man as Hero. None of that cold-eyed passion for historical reality carried over in his pupils’ work. Ingres inherited his cold eye, but turned it on unimaginable odalisques and comfortable patrons. His other illustrious pupil, Antoine-Jean Gros, almost reversed the master by ushering in a new school of romantic pageantry. Like David, Gros became caught up in the whirlwind of contemporary politics. Through Josephine, he met Bonaparte in 1796, was given a role in the French army’s confiscation of Italian art treasures, then taken into Napoleon’s entourage.

Part of his franchise was to see his master in the most majestic terms, and Bonaparte Visiting the Pest-Ridden of Jaffa, showing the conqueror touching the sores of a hapless victim of the plague, was clearly intended to portray Napoleon as the modern hero sans pareil. But the picture is redeemed by the sharply observed bodies of the stricken. David would probably have laid the scene in a bare hospital room, and Gros considered just that. But feeling the need tor a more theatrical setting for his hero, he conceived of a Moorish courtyard looking out on the ramparts of the city. When the painting was shown in the Salon of 1804, younger artists wreathed it in laurel.

None appreciated the painting more than Eugène Delacroix, who compared its creator to Homer. An aristocrat who was reputed to be the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, Delacroix both extended and refined Gros’ epic romanticism. Though his high baroque style claimed no successor, Delacroix’s techniques in juxtaposing complementary colors influenced Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionists. He hit upon the method on a visit to Morocco in 1832. He found that by counterpointing color opposites, which by the law of optics fused in the eye to form gray, he could attain at once a strong effect and a sense of overall harmony. The validity of his theory can be traced in an unusually delicate if cloyingly romantic painting, the 1854 idyll Turkish Women Bathing. The Greek statuary and the languid maidens seem a bit ridiculous, but its true quality lies in its handling of color. The transparent blues of the water and sky determine the orange garments of two figures, the dusky greens set off the dark red of a blanket.

Unprejudiced View. By midcentury, the time’s inherent romanticism found expression in a burst of landscape painting—and a new respect for human problems. Corot marched out of doors to paint, and the Barbizon school followed. Jean-Francois Millet captured the inherent dignity of peasant farmers, Daumier the poetry of the Parisian poor. But the overall point that the Minneapolis show makes is that 19th century French painting has too long been viewed as a vast academic conspiracy against the innovators who are now enshrined as the founders of modern art. It makes for a story of martyrs and villains. But, as usual in history, the victors were not all that virtuous and the vanquished not all that guilty. The Impressionists and their heirs have become an academy in their turn, and developed their own excesses. The superrealism of today’s pop artists and the brutal clarity of the new realists represent a backlash, which permits one to view the once scorned academics of yesteryear with a new sympathy.

An unprejudiced eye can now see that Rosa Bonheur’s celebrated horses do indeed rollick with inimitable vigor, a battle scene by Meissonier can be moving, a lush nude dancer by Theodore Chasseriau genuinely sensual. Many people have always felt this, but now they can admit it without seeming hopelessly unsophisticated. Taken together and seen thus, argues Director Anthony Clark, the period was the “proudest century of French painting.”