1900 Rediscovered - art exhibition

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Michael Duncan

Other works evoke the strategies of later, socially conscious artists. Focused on the searing gaze of an ash-daubed young girl, The Burn-Beating (1893) by Jarnefelt presages both Kathe Kollwitz's depictions of wartime agonies and Walker Evans's photographs of hard-up Appalachians. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's The Fourth Estate, 1901, (which in its final version was reproduced for the opening credits of Bernardo Bertolucci's film 1900) ushers in the century's Socialist movement with its solemn, irrepressible horde of peasants approaching the viewer en masse.

As demonstrated in the "Portraits" and "Self-Portraits" sections, turn-of-the-century realist painting showed a virtuosic confidence and psychological subtlety that has not diminished with time. The arch poses and flamboyant brushwork of Sargent's depiction of the frilly, beribboned Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children (1895) seem trumped by the finesse of Giovanni Boldini's debonair Portrait of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1897). Ignacio Zuloaga's Portrait of a Dwarf (1899) evokes Velazquez's Las Meninas with its bold-faced, chubby-cheeked subject clutching a mirrored ball whose convex reflection reveals the painter at work.

Among the self-portraits, Picasso, Mondrian, Gauguin, Hodler, Eakins, Gwen John, Renoir and Franz von Stuck gaze fiercely ahead as if staring down the future, daring contemporary viewers to disregard their historical stature and see them once again as real men and women. Although facing left, Paula Modersohn-Becker directs her bold, limpid eyes back to center stage. Aurelia de Sousa leans slightly forward, mouth clenched, eyes ready to burn through the canvas.

The exhibition's inclusion of Beaux-Arts-style salon art has led some critics to protest the open display of kitsch. These complaints seem an attempt to rekindle the debate that flared over the Musee d'Orsay's decision, at the time of its 1986 opening, to prominently feature works by salon favorites such as Bouguereau and Couture. Yet "1900" only confirms that old-fashioned and disparaging definitions of the term "kitsch" have lost their bite. As so many of the show's complex and intriguing selections demonstrate, realistic and accessible modes of depiction do not inevitably convey the simplistic pieties and one-note emotions of kitsch.

Furthermore, the current embrace of popular culture as a legitimate source for art has problematized the oppositional relationship between kitsch and advanced art. Contemporary works by Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and Jeff Koons have turned the whole notion of kitsch inside out. Moreover, the increasing academicization of the avant-garde has led to the same kinds of unthinking acceptance and moralizing certitude that once bolstered salon and pompier painting. A presumably progressive work such as Hans Haacke's contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2000, Sanitation, seems as guilty of ersatz emotion, pietism and received ideas as a painting by Bouguerau.

Similarly, the theatricality that once branded some realist paintings as kitsch no longer seems a necessarily negative attribute. For example, Alfred Guillou's melodramatic large-scale painting of a shipwreck survivor's good-bye kiss to his drowned lover, Farewell (1892), taps into the power of great sea stories. Indeed, in a single image, the artist conjures elemental fears with a kind of primal force that outdoes all the lavish special effects of James Cameron's Titanic.