Exalting in Life's Sweeter Side; Shows at Washington's National Gallery of Art and the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico celebrate the craftsmanship and accomplishment of French painters

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 19, 2004

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Two first-rate exhibitions one at a major U.S. gallery, the other touring top galleries in smaller towns across the country brought great French paintings to the American public in 2003, and many of the paintings will continue to be on view in 2004. The National Gallery of Art in Washington displayed "The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard," a show of genre painting by 18th-century masters. Genre painting is an art-world term for works picturing scenes from everyday life.

And at the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico, Insight viewed "Millet to Matisse," an exhibition featuring 19th- and 20-century French paintings from the excellent collection of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland.

The two shows were packed (there were exceptions, but they were few) with breathtaking examples of the high standards of craftsmanship and accomplishment French artists set for themselves and often achieved. Painting rarely, if ever, gets much better than this.

The earliest artist in the National Gallery show, the great Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), for example, painted a French upper class that's at its peak refined, sophisticated and visibly pleased with itself. In his Venetian Pleasures (ca. 1718-19), we glimpse how sweet life could be for that privileged class. Watteau's painting shows us 15 or so elegantly clad people in a semicircle around a dancing couple.

By the middle of the 18th century there's change in the air, a fact dramatically registered in the 108 paintings by the 27 artists that constitute this exhibition. Great artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) and Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) now painted members of the lower classes, previously regarded as subjects unworthy of an important artist's attention or, perhaps, unable to pay a big price to see themselves on a painter's canvas.

Whatever the reasons, the painters at midcentury lavished as much skill and care rendering the poor and lowly at work or in their homes as earlier painters had used to picture aristocrats at play. In Greuze's The Kitchen Maid (1761), there's no hint of condescension toward the cheeky young woman who pauses to look in our direction as she washes clothes. The same is true of Chardin's Soap Bubbles (1735-40), where a boy, framed by a window, plays at blowing bubbles from a pipe while a second boy looks on from behind.

Some historians describe the change in subject matter from aristocracy to middle and working classes as heralding the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789. That's only partly true. In England and Holland painting bore witness to similar social transformations, yet there was no eruption of violence.

But these 18th-century paintings aren't merely historical artifacts, evidence of a revolution about to take place. They're also great art, and to see them as nothing more than records of their time detracts from the enormous aesthetic pleasure they provide and which their creators sought to offer their public.

One of the finest works in the exhibition is Jean-Honore Fragonard's The Happy Family (dated after 1769). It is an oval painting in which Fragonard, who lived between 1732 and 1806, depicts a simple mother surrounded by her children. One child plays with a dog, another is held in its mother's arms, suggesting much earlier paintings of the Holy Family.

But this isn't the Christ Child and his mother. It's a picture of an otherwise unexceptional mother transformed into extraordinary beauty by the love she so obviously bestows upon her brood. Rarely has the richness and importance of family closeness and a mother's love been more movingly rendered.

In the "Millet to Matisse" show of 19th- and 20th-century masters in Albuquerque, we enter a very different world. The French Revolution has taken place. The old order has been overthrown and traditional religion is on the wane. Romanticism has made very deep inroads in all segments of culture, from poetry to painting.

And what has emerged is a rapidly evolving art world where new movements and new ways of painting appear in increasingly rapid succession. It's also a time when individual artists in ways they hadn't since the time of Michelangelo and Leonardo in the Renaissance gain larger-than-life reputations as titans of creativity very different from the rest of us.

These developments are in evidence in the carefully selected 64 paintings that make up the "Millet to Matisse" exhibition. Romanticism and its strong influence on landscapes, for example, is well-represented in paintings such as Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot's (1796-1875) The Woodcutter (c. 1865-70) and The Forest of Clairbois (ca. 1836-39) by Theodore Rousseau (1812-67).

But how deeply romanticism penetrated 19th-century European culture is more clearly demonstrated in Jean-Francois Millet's Going to Work (ca. 1850-51). Millet (1814-1875) was a very popular artist in his time; his Going to Work shows a peasant couple on their way to the fields in the early morning. These are lowly folk whose condition is rendered far more lowly than in Chardin's or Greuze's paintings of lower-class subjects of a century earlier. The husband carries a pitchfork over his right shoulder. The couple is ready for a hard day. In the distance, a small herd of cattle is visible.