JOHN ZEAMAN

Nineteenth Century

Paul Gauguin

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In 1902, Paul Gauguin, sick and impoverished in the Marquesas Islands, wrote a friend that he was thinking of returning to Europe to regain his health. His friend wrote back that it might be a mistake—now that he was a legend.

“You enjoy the same immunity as the great dead,” he wrote. “You have passed into the history of art.”

Even Gauguin’s most ordinary genre scenes from Polynesia have a meditative mood.

Within a year it was literally so. Gauguin, suffering from syphilis, painful eczema, and advanced heart disease, was dead. In the decade after, there were 46 exhibits of his work in 15 European cities. By the time of the famous 1913 Armory Show in Manhattan, Gauguin was a god of modernism. New York collectors snatched up his work. Many of these pieces eventually came to the Metropolitan Museum and many others have remained in private American collections.

“Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic,” brings together 120 pieces—some friends, some strangers, and all of them revelatory. It doesn’t present itself as a blockbuster — the whole show fits in the lower level of the Robert Lehman Wing — and yet this show, rather than the more high-profile Thomas Eakins exhibit – is the true star of the summer season.
Mostly it’s because Gauguin, almost a century removed from us now, holds up so well. Much is made of his life in exotic locales, but the world revealed in the paintings is a timeless one of dreams and imagination. While Cezanne hammered out a new reality of structure, Gauguin— no less abstract—orchestrated his canvases like musical pieces, boldly simplifying shapes, finding new harmonies of hue in minor keys, and spraying notes of color across sun dappled clearings and swirling pools of water.

It just doesn’t get old, this kind of painting. Even now, after a century of artistic experimentation that he helped launch, Gauguin looks wiser and wiser. He knew the answer wasn’t in traditional realism or the optical realism of impressionism. Nor was in the reductionism that became the driving force in art after his death. Yes, painting should be abstract like music, he seemed to say, but it was also about the image, about drama, and the great stories of the past.

And, that is why, when he painted one of his Polynesian beauties, she often became Eve, or the Virgin Mary, or an Egyptian from the 18th Dynasty. And why, when he painted himself, he was Adam, or the devil, or even Christ on the cross.

Although many of the paintings in this show can be seen at the Met any day of the week, seeing them interspersed with works from upstate museums and private collections —including such masterpieces as the haunting “Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching),” and “The Yellow Christ,” both from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo—makes them look new again.

Adding to the critical mass are eight Gauguins from a companion exhibit, “The Age of Impressionism: European Painting from the Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen,” It includes his iconic work, “Human Miseries. The Wine Harvest,” in which a red-headed peasant woman, chin in hands, seethes with a kind of imploding fury—her face literally turning green in the process. She became a Gauguin archetype, a symbol of malignant unhappiness. She appears here in two different prints, a woodcut and a lithograph, both entitled “Human Misery.”

And that brings up another great feature of this exhibit, the cross-referencing between the major oils and the variety of other media that Gauguin worked in. You name it, he did it: sculpture, ceramics, wood reliefs, drawings, watercolors, prints. Indeed, Gauguin comes across as an artist-wizard who transforms everything he touches.

He could be an impractical a dreamer, but also tireless in promoting and explaining his art. He made a fictitious illustrated journal, “Noa Noa,” (Fragrance) about his first trip to Tahiti. He made suites of prints, gave interviews, and wrote long letters, often illustrated, in which he expounded on art and life and local politics. It didn’t bring him financial success, but his energy and versatility created a rich body of work in which images abound like leitmotifs in an opera.

Take, for example, his carving of a man with horns. The head is mounted on a pedestal, giving it the look of a quirky chess piece. It is another of Gauguin’s alter egos, but are we meant to see it as good or evil? Despite the horns, there is something benign and intelligent about this face. Elsewhere, in a pair of drawings titled “Polynesian Beauty and Evil Spirit,” the artist looks unrepentantly demonic. Man, he tells us, contains both Devil and God.

Gauguin explored man’s dual nature in this carving.

There are wonderful wood carvings here, including several large reliefs, and a wooden walking stick adorned with a with a naked Eve, an entwining snake, and a Breton shoe handle (which opens to reveal a secret compartment).

For all his immersion in primitive life, Gauguin sometimes painted from photographic sources, including documentary images and even Tahitian postcards. for some of his subjects. Equally clear, however, is how little it matters. Unlike Eakins, for whom the photographic reality was the goal, Gauguin used it as a starting point. Nothing is literally transcribed. In the case of the the Met’s own “Two Women,” from 1902, for example, which is based on an 1894 documentary photograph, nothing remains the same: not the poses, the landscape, the faces, or the color. Likewise for his famous painting, “Self-Portrait with Palette,” in which Gauguin wears a cape and a conical hat. It is based on a photograph. But in comparing the two —one prosaic, the other mythic—we experience the gulf between mundane reality and art.

Metropolitan Museum
June, 2002

Van Gogh Flowers

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In the spring of 1889, following a mental breakdown, Vincent Van Gogh  committed himself to an asylum in the French town of Saint-Remy.  The doctor there diagnosed his mania and hallucinations as symptoms of epilepsy.  Van Gogh, recovering from the notorious ear-cutting incident,, settled in and did what he always did: he painted.

In fact, the restorative year he spent at Saint-Remy was remarkably productive. He painted the asylum’s garden and the view out his bedroom window. He depicted the hallways and courtyards of the asylum – depressing scenes of other patients trudging listlessly about – but his work from nature showed his usual verve. At first, he sketched the insects and birds that visited the garden.

Soon, however, he was making forays into the surrounding landscape. It was here that he painted his swirling cypresses and the ecstatic “Starry Night.”

After a year, he was pronounced well enough to leave. As a coda to his sojourn, he undertook a quartet of flower paintings.  It was mid-May. He gathered up flowers from the blooms in the abundant garden. He did two paintings of purple irises and two of pale pink roses. He wrote to his sister that he “worked like a man in a frenzy,” but there is nothing chaotic about their execution. If anything, they are serene.

When Van Gogh boarded a train north, the paintings were left behind to dry. Several weeks later, they were shipped to him in Auvers.  The quartet stayed together only briefly. In late July, Van Gogh committed suicide. Two of the paintings hung in his mother’s house until her death in 1906.  These were eventually acquired by the Metropolitan Museum.

Now, the museum has borrowed the other two from museums in Washington, D.C and Amsterdam, and, on this, the 125th anniversary of their creation, brought them together once again.  Displayed at the center of the museum’s Robert Lehman Wing, they are a handsome set. All are painted on the same size canvas. Two are vertical compositions and two are horizontal, but all four use the same low horizon line – just a small strip of table for the vases to rest on – so that you see the bouquets face on, so to speak.

The paintings were originally composed around strong complementary colors – both yellow-violet and pink-green — and yet these contrasts have been severely diminished.  Although this exhibit is celebratory, it’s also an occasion to dwell on the sometimes fugitive nature of beauty in oil paintings.

Van Gogh took a chance on some oil paints that have proved very unstable.  These are the light sensitive “red lake pigments” which gradually fade over time. Early postcard copies of the paintings show just how much.  The Met’s horizontal irises were arrayed against a pink background that has turned an icy white.  The same fate has befallen the two bouquets of Roses de Provence, sometimes called the “hundred-petaled rose.”  Once a mix of pinks and ivories, these blossoms have only faint traces of pink, now. A video presentation gives an approximation of how much more vivid several of the paintings originally looked.

The vertical composition of irises from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is the masterpiece of the four and seems to have retained most of its original chromatic punch.  The disappearing reds have left the irises somewhat more blue than purple, but the unchanged lemon yellow background makes them look purple, anyway. Van Gogh had a way of animating the inanimate so that the iris’s arabesque petals seem to undulate and reach out into the surrounding air.  Poking up like sharp spears are a half-dozen bright green stems and leaves.

Like the Japanese artists he admired, Van Gogh had a special affinity for irises.  In his handling, the roses are a softer, more feminine flower.  You see none of their thorniness or tough stems.  They tumble all over each other as if unable to keep their heads up. Instead of animating the flowers, Van Gogh animated the background with wavy lines that suggest a breeze.

The effect is one of an intoxicating fragrance, which, along with the manic, insistent growth seen in the iris, and the lavish displays of color in both flowers (even if diminished) pretty much sum up the many-faceted spectacle of spring.

 

 

 

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

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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.

 

 

 

 

Rooms with a View

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Caspar David Friedrich

For as long as there have been windows, artists have painted them.  Think of Vermeer with the light streaming in, Matisse with his billowing curtains, Rembrandt with his peasants leaning out. Think of all the flowerpots and cats sitting on windowsills, all the charming rooftop and treetop scenes, or even those medieval miracle paintings with angels riding through windows on sunbeams.

And when it comes right down to it, doesn’t the window itself – a frame with an image in it — look like a painting?

In “Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art zeroes in on a period in art – German romanticism – when the window-motif seemed to resonate more than usual.  Curator Sabine Rewald has rounded up 31 oil paintings and 26 works on paper to make her case that windows had a special poignancy for artists in the early to mid-1800s.

If the show has a hero, it’s Caspar David Friedrich.  In his maturity, he became known for paintings of spiritual pilgrims pondering moonlit landscapes, alpine sunsets or other sublime vistas. We meet him earlier in his career, when, fresh out of art school, he moved to Dresden and settled into a studio with a view of the Elbe River.  A few years later he made two sepia-wash drawings of his tall arched windows that nudged art history in a new direction.

Georg Friedrich Kersting

What was so special about them?  Despite being only about a foot high, these simple, architecturally precise drawings feel large and expansive. There are few details inside or outside to detract from the basic facts of glass, wall, light and air. The narrow strip of river scenery is too pale, too subdued to be the point of the picture.  Likewise for the dark, minimalist treatment of the interior room.  What remains is the window, which, for the first time, was itself the subject of a picture.

What the romantics saw in these luminous windows was a yearning for something distant and ineffable, a metaphor for spiritual longing.

Friedrich’s act was a tough one to follow. His stark, stripped-down imagery didn’t leave much room for others to stake claims.  Elaboration was the only direction left.  Even Friedrich himself couldn’t recapture the existential force of his original inspiration. An oil painting of his wife made about 15 years later feels like a pleasant genre painting – a woman, seen from the back, gazing dreamily out of a window.

Other women, by other painters are also seen at windows here. All are charming. One braids her Rapunzel tresses. Another, fresh from her bed in her cozily decorated room, leans out the window to greet the new day.  We see women sewing or spinning in the window light, absorbed in their work like the women in Vermeer paintings.

Other painters left figures out entirely, but, unlike Friedrich, couldn’t resist opening windows onto vivid little paradises with castles and gorgeous sunsets. A German artist named Carl Ludwig Kaaz didn’t like his own studio’s view, so used the more picturesque view from another painter’s studio. Still finding it less than ideal, he “italianized” it, turned the German scenery into what looks like a Giorgione landscape.

Georg Friedrich Kersting_

Windows seem to have been a popular motif with young French painters who had won the prestigious Prix de Rome.  The award allowed them to spend five years at the Académie de France in the Villa Medici in Rome.  As if composing snapshots to send home, they painted themselves settling into their room, bags on the chair, hat tossed on the bed.  At the center of the picture is a window with a view of the poetic countryside – the campagna – that awaited them outside the Eternal City.

In a twist on the window-as-painting theme, a picture by an artist named Carl Gustav Carus shows a blank canvas propped up against a window frame, the working side facing out. What this about?  As a studio practice, painters at that time were instructed to block out the light from the lower part of the window, so that the room would be lit only by the less direct light reflected off the upper sky.

And yet, in this context, it plays like a surrealist joke: the painting as a window on the world – except somebody forgot to turn it around.

Cezanne Cardplayers

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With slow, methodical strokes, Paul Cezanne probed the secret structure of things. His subjects seem to tremble on a threshold – still the palpable apples, tables and trees of the natural world, but on the verge of dissolving into spheres, planes and cylinders.

The paintings are not so much about what you see, as about the sensation of seeing. The artist suppressed most traditional content –anecdote, narrative, physical likeness, and surface detail — in order to give a flickering glimpse of a more fundamental reality.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that some critics would find fault with this.  Cezanne, some of them said, left too much out.  His work is all about perception.  It’s too cold, too analytical.

As one early-20h-century critic put it, Cezanne took “no more interest in a human face than in an apple… People and things impassioned him only with regard to their quality as objects to be painted.”

I’ve never bought it. To me, there is no lack of personal feeling, any more than there is in a poet’s description of aun unpeopled landscape.

But some people do, and the question is taken up in the Metropolitan Museum’s new exhibit, “Cézanne’s Card Players.”

There’s never been a show devoted to this group of paintings. The complete card-player series consists of five big paintings – of which this show has three — and numerous studies and single figure portraits.  All were painted between 1890 and 1896.  Cezanne by this time had left Paris and the impressionist scene to live on his family’s estate outside Aix-en-Provence in the south of France.  The subjects who posed for him were gardeners, other employees, and working people or “peasants.”  In many, people smoke simple clay pipes or have them at hand.

Because these are genre pictures (depictions of human activities), people on both sides of the debate claim them to support their argument.  Those who say Cezanne was emotionally engaged with his subjects point to these as belonging to a lively and colorful tradition of card-player paintings.

The show has two-dozen such works from the Met’s collection – mostly prints –  that treat the motifs of card playing and smoking.  These range from 17th-century Dutch and Flemish etchings and engravings to 19th-century French prints by Daumier and Manet. Many are rowdy scenes with drinking and gambling. In a print based on a Caravaggio painting, we see two card sharps in the act of cheating a foppish young man.  The most memorable of these is 17th-century Flemish artist Adriaen Brouwer’s “The Smokers,” a tavern scene in which the artist himself gaily blows smoke rings, while another tipsy fellow blows smoke through one nostril.

But these paintings support the opposite argument as well. The images by the Flemish, Dutch and French artists are packed with personality and narrative. They could be scenes in a play, in which you can see frustration, triumph, concentration, and deviousness.

Compare this to Cezanne’s works, in which the card players sit stock still, seemingly studying their cards.  There is no movement, no facial expression, no hint even as to the type of game or how it will turn out.

There is so little engagement between the players, that the art historian Meyer Shapiro described them as playing a game of “collective solitaire.”

And yet, what beautiful paintings.  Cezanne, in making figures that seemed carved out of rock traded anecdote for a sense of timelessness.  There’s something gained in these impassive demeanors that would be lost if one of them was smirking or steaming.

And it’s clear from his statements that Cezanne was very much concerned with the humanity of his subjects. At a time when his impressionist colleagues were painting Parisians with top hats and parasols, he saw his paintings as a tribute to rural traditions.

As he put it, “Today everything is changing, but not for me. I live in my hometown, and I rediscover the past in the faces of people my age. I love above all the appearance of people who have grown old without breaking with old customs.”

Such a figure can be seen in the portrait of a man who is believed to be of his gardener, Paulin Paulet, dressed in a suit and smoking a pipe.  There’s even pathos to be found in the portrait of the slope-shouldered young man – titled “Peasant”– in which the subject stares downward in an attitude that seems to mix stoicism and defeat.

 

James Ensor

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James Ensor’s studio in Ostende, Belgium was a sunny, attic space.  You’d never guess this by the paintings he produced in it. A gray, sooty atmosphere blankets his early interiors and street scenes.  Even a subject as emotionally tepid as two women having tea seems dominated by a hostile weather system.

Later, Ensor made brighter paintings.  Much brighter. But these are so nightmarish as to make the weak of heart long for the simple gloominess of the early work.

Ensor, who lived from 1860 to 1949, is the subject of an appropriately strange and disturbing exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. He is one of the earliest of the modern expressionists, although the term hadn’t been invented yet. To get a sense of who Ensor was, try to imagine Hieronymous Bosch transplanted to 19th century bourgeois society from the hyper-religious atmosphere of the late medieval world, a painter with the same penchant for monsters and chimeras, but without the framework of Hell and damnation in which to express it.

As horrible as Bosch’s visions of torment were, after all, they took place away from the everyday world, in the imagined realms of Genesis or Judgment Day. Ensor’s settings, in contrast, are the familiar cafes and garrets of La Boheme, but inhabited by skeletons, ghouls and other grotesques.

When these characters first appear, in an 1883 painting called “The Scandalized Masks,” it is a plausible enough situation: A man wearing a pig mask, drinking alone in a dimly-lit café, greets a new arrival who is dressed as an old hag or witch. It looks like the end-of-the-night reunion of two revelers from the night’s Mardi Gras carnival.

Such celebrations were held every year in Ostend, a popular vacation spot. In fact, as the exhibit wall text explains, the grotesque and vulgar visages that sometimes fill Ensor’s canvases had plenty of other sources in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking popular culture, not to mention in Ensor’s personal life: his family sold masks in its seaside souvenir stand and Ensor’s eccentric grandmother had a penchant for dressing up in strange costumes.

But it’s where Ensor took this material that made him the Edgar Allen Poe of painting.  Soon, you have cause to wonder if some of these horrible faces are not masks, after all, but the figures’ real faces. And when skeletons start painting pictures and the weird revelers start doing grisly operations with pans on the floor to catch the blood, you know it’s not carnival time anymore.

Although Ensor lived virtually to the middle of the 20th century, his most creative period was from 1880 to the mid-1890s, the focus of this show.  Missing is his best-known masterpiece, the monumental “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889,” in which the tiny figure of Jesus on a donkey is practically obscured by the swirling crowds (it’s owned by the J.Paul Getty Museum in California, and was deemed too fragile to loan). You can see others from this body of visionary paintings and drawings, in which Christ exudes a radiant, form-dissolving light.

If you’re looking for a wedge into Ensor, try following the light. He tends to use it in unexpected ways. Most artists — Goya, for example – employ a dark palette when trying to arouse our deepest fears. But Ensor goes the opposite way. The grimmer the subject, the brighter the light.  But it’s a stark, pitiless, shadowless light, an operating room light, scarier than the dark, perhaps, because it leaves us no refuge.

It’s hard to classify Ensor. In fact, it’s impossible. At a time when many of his contemporaries were drawn to the pointillism of Seurat, an optical system, Ensor was using light to evoke both fear and religious feeling. He could also be a savage social critic, as evidenced by the caricatures and scatological cartoons that hang here right next to the paintings. And, whatever religious feelings stirred within him, they weren’t  enough to save him from his obsession with death and what sometimes seems a horror in existence itself.

He was unique in so many ways, and because of that and because his work was deemed illustrational, he hasn’t received the attention bestowed on those within the modernist canon. That seems about to change.