Sometimes an artist’s lesser works are the ones that win your heart.
The sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux is mostly remembered today for such monumental pieces as “Ugolino and his Sons,” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a scene from Dante’s “Inferno,” in which a starving tyrant is on the verge of cannibalizing his own offspring. The style is romanticism verging on melodrama. Ugolino has his fingers hooked into his grimacing mouth as if he’s about to gnaw them off.
Carpeaux (1827–1875) was the dominant sculptor in France during the glory days of the Second Empire when Napoleon III was redesigning the city of Paris. All this construction created opportunities for sculpture. Carpeaux’s most celebrated public sculpture is “The Dance,” a group of frolicking nudes for the façade of the new Paris Opera. Much beloved today, it was attacked as “pornographic” when first unveiled and a pot of ink was thrown at it.
Carpeaux was something of a tortured soul. He was prone to explosive mood swings. He almost lost his vision through excessive exposure to marble dust. He tormented his wife and ruined his marriage with jealous suspicions. He contracted bladder cancer in his mid-40s and suffered horribly for the last two years of his life.
Not for nothing has the Metropolitan Museum titled its ambitious exhibit on him, “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.”
The sculptor’s wife.
And yet, amid all the visceral power and dynamic movement on display here, there are other works that seem the creation of a calm, Apollonian sensibility. These are the portraits — sculpted busts in plaster, marble and bronze. They are spread throughout the show, with groupings here and there. Many of the subjects are famous today — such as the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, the composer Charles Gounod, the novelist Alexandre Dumas fils.
But no matter who it was, Carpeaux had a way of bringing out the essence of that person’s character – whether it was brilliance, wit, wisdom, kindness or charm. Other sculptors can hit this bulls-eye occasionally. Carpeaux seemed to do it every time, so that walking among them is like being at a great party with people that you are happy to meet.
Gérôme is dashing, with hair like tossing waves and a waxed moustache, but it’s the keen, alert eyes that draw you in. Gounod was rendered with a piercing expression of Olympian intelligence. He liked it so much that he ordered 20 copies to give to his friends.
Carpeaux sculpted his beautiful wife, Amélie, with her head slightly dipped so that she looks up fetchingly, a piece that agrees with a contemporary description of her as “blonde with blue eyes and a candid yet mischievous look.”
Carpeaux brought out the charms of older women, too, as with Marguerite-Henriette-Joséphine Wilson, a celebrated hostess who looks lively, smart and welcoming. Vanity was not one of her faults, apparently; she let Carpeaux include the little tufts of hair on both sides of her chin.
Detail from “Ugolino and His Sons.”
Finally, there is the portrait of Louis-Napoléon after he was deposed and forced into exile. The shoulders are left bare, recalling the style with Roman emperors. Despite the grand moustache extending beyond the borders of his face, the old ruler looks defeated, his eyes cast off to one side as if does not want to meet the viewer’s gaze.
Few people saw Carpeaux’s paintings during his life. He apparently did them for himself, so that they are executed with a freedom and a lack of finish that looks modern. One big painting, which depicts an assassination attempt on Russian Czar Alexander II, almost looks like an abstract expressionist canvas.
Carpeaux was full of wonder, but he often saw life through a dark lens. He drew his wife while she was giving birth and captured the violence of the event. He drew scenes of shipwrecks with heaps of dead and dying people. And he painted his own deterioration in the last stages of cancer. In one of these self-portraits he is gaunt, struggling, it seems, to keep his head up and his eyes focused.
Photography was in its early stages in Carpeaux’s day. Lesser artists, especially portrait painters, were looking over their shoulders. But Carpeaux had absolutely nothing to fear from photography. No photograph, even those today, has ever captured the essence of a living person with such warmth and vitality as Carpeaux’s renderings in stone and metal.
