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Art: ELEGANT LINES FROM AN ELEGANT AGE

2 minute read
TIME

IN retrospect, 18th century France seems to have been minueting straight for the guillotine. Its art, with the emphasis on immediate sensual pleasure expressed in delicately tinted surfaces, often lacked the suggestion of tragedy that carries art beyond the incidental and transitory.

But to contemporaries, the 18th century was the Age of Elegance, one of those brief moments in history when man can abandon himself to the art of living. Warmed by the afterglow of France’s great Sun King, Louis XIV, the Versailles court lived a lavish life. Its taste and style were enviously mimicked in the other courts of Europe and in the newly decorated salons of Paris’ prosperous bourgeoisie. The age’s artists par excellence were Francois Boucher and his brilliant pupil, Jean Honore Fragonard.

Boucher’s patroness was Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour, and the artist worked furiously to keep up with her demands and those of the court—decorations for chateaux, scenery for opera and theater, lush paintings of nudes, and tapestry designs for the revived Gobelin and 54 Beauvais works. But his talent for rendering sensuous and elegant women in symbolic attitudes is best seen in his drawings, where quick pencil strokes catch the freshness and spontaneity of his inspiration.

Fragonard, some 30 years younger than Boucher, drifted with the increasing vulgarity of his time, trying hard to please the flamboyant Madame du Barry. Often he peddled his frumptious nudes to Paris’ burgeoning demimonde. Fragonard also was a master draftsman with an inspired poetic vision, as proved by his sanguines (red crayon sketches) of Tivoli’s Renaissance palace, Villa d’Este, surrounded by antique ruins.

The Boucher and Fragonard drawings opposite are included in a collection of 55 masterpieces of French and Italian drawing on loan from France’s Museum of Besan-Qon and showing this week at The Detroit Institute of Arts. From Detroit the show will go on to Indianapolis, Cincinnati and San Francisco to give gallerygoers a fascinating look at what the ancien regime regarded as modern art.

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