Art: To the Louvre

The theory behind the Luxembourg museum is typical of the logical French mind. Praises of living artists are forever reverberating in the cafes and studios of France. But these hallelujahs, often fanatical in intensity, are usually ignored by bland, potent French critics. These priests of the Louvre are too wise to ballyhoo any skyrocketing dauber who happens to be the vogue. But occasionally the critical pundits suspect a novice of immortality. When this happens they have a routine gesture of generosity. They hang his pictures in the Luxembourg. For a minimum of ten years the pictures generally stay there. Thousands see them, thousands talk about them, the pundits study them. Only the work of genius can survive this bitter ordeal by familiarity. At length the enduring works are borne with punditical hosannas to the Louvre. The rest descend in devious channels to oblivion.

Last week a Ministerial decree announced the imminent transfer of the Luxembourg collection of Impressionist & Post-Impressionist art to the Louvre. For all of the painters the honor was posthumous.* Their long, tempestuous trial at the Luxembourg outlasted their lives. They had tried to paint what they perceived as current realities. Often they were frustrated, tortured in the patient attempts to convey the actualities of their vision. But they believed in an art stimulated by the living, not the dead. For this they were excoriated by a host of pompous academicians, who applauded apes of the classical tradition.

Thus last week’s decree was a major triumph for vitality as opposed to senescence. For although Impressionist painting is included in private collections at the Louvre it has never been received in great quantities.

Henceforth the Louvre will spaciously exhibit:

The garish Tahitian fantasies of Paul Gauguin. He found the soft woods and streams of Brittany an exhausted subject. He lived, painted and died in the South Seas, where sunlight bursts like bombshells on labyrinthine foliage, showers lustrous patterns on voluptuous dark flesh.

The iridescent landscapes of Vincent van Gogh, madman. When he had no brushes he squirted paint from his color tubes. Insanely he attacked Gauguin with a razor, then lopped off one of his own ears, sent it in an envelope to a bordello. He died by his own hand.

The gigantesque floral graces of Auguste Renoir whose canvases are glowing bouquets of drapery, decoration, tinted flesh.

The hard honesties of Paul Cézanne. Most scrupulous of painters, he lived like an eremite, relentlessly purged his optic sense of all illusion, all imaginative invention. Fearing dishonesty he painted, repainted, erased everything and painted again.

The vibrant, airy landscapes of Claude Monet, worshipper of sunlight, rapt student of motes, beams, the subtle tones of shadows. More than any other man, Monet epitomizes the impressionist movement, the realization that perceptual reality is not composed of insulated objects each of characteristic colors, but is rather a play of shapes at once defined and related by the one blazing spectrum of the sun.

* Conservative criticism might lead ignorant laymen to believe that impressionists & post-impressionists are frenzied young anarchists. But the leaders have all died. Paul Cézanne, pioneer postimpressionist, succumbed to diabetes in 1906 at the age of 67.