March to modernism

"The Triumph of French Painting" tracks an artistic revolution turned evolution, a movement predicated on freedom of perception for painter and viewer.

By MARY ANN MARGER

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 14, 2001

Edouard Manet, The Cafe-Concert, 1878/9, oil on canvas, from the Walters Gallery.

WEST PALM BEACH -- A second kind of French revolution shook Paris in the early years of the 19th century, and its reverberations are still felt in the art world. An exhibit at the Norton Museum of Art takes us through the seminal years of modern art through the eyes and minds of those who made it happen.

"The Triumph of French Painting," borrowed from the Baltimore Museum of Art and Baltimore's Walters Art Gallery, traces through 56 paintings the history of art from the French Revolution through the impressionists to Picasso and Matisse.

No battle or outcry marked the birth of modern art. Certainly it had its beginnings -- at least in attitude -- around 1800 in neoclassicism. This movement rejected the lovely, yet vapid, subjects preferred by royalty and replaced them, in the spirit of democracy, with elegant paintings that looked back to ancient Greece.

At the opposite pole was romanticism, a more dynamic concept playing on the viewer's emotions. Conveyed through dramatic compositions which emphasized bold contrasts of unmixed color laid next to each other, it foretold the technique of the impressionists.

These extremes are exemplified by two works early in the exhibit: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' exquisite Oedipus and the Sphinx and Eugene Delacroix's vigorous Christ on the Sea of Galilee.

Ingres depicts an ideally proportioned Oedipus gazing above the sphinx's pointed breasts to solve the riddle, "What travels on four legs in morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?"

When he correctly answered "Man," the distressed creature flung herself over the rocky cliff. But we don't see that; Ingres' painting embodies perfection in a static moment. Had Eugene Delacroix treated the subject, he would surely have painted her en route to her demise.

It was a third approach, though, that would have the most impact on the impressionists and on the course of modern art: realism, depicting not history or myth but the everyday life of the present. The impressionists took a cue from the landscapes of Gustave Courbet and from Camille Corot, who moved his canvases outdoors to paint in plein air. For the impressionists, the practice would become standard.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry, ca. 1897, oil on canvas, from the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Meanwhile, academic painting was still strong, though the Royal Academy, which laid down the rules, was replaced by the more egalitarian Academy of Fine Arts and, for education, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Its teachers included artists who were great, though not progressive. Jean-Leon Gerome revealed his mastery of melodrama through delineated form; he disdained impressionism. Thomas Couture conveyed a preference for contemporary subjects to student Edouard Manet. Charles Gleyre clung to the past in his own work but encouraged the freedom of expression that enabled students Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Auguste Renoir to set modern art on a new course.

The impressionists recorded the world around them in a century of great change. Manet, in The Cafe-Concert, paints a favorite and familiar Montmartre subject. In a diagonal line, right to left, he brings together the three elements of the bar scene: the customer, resting his arm on his cane, the barmaid, taking a drink, and the performer, reflected in a mirror behind. Viewers understand perspective by each figure's size, overlapping, placement and intensity of color.

The show is heavy in rural landscapes, crossing many stylistic interpretations. Several works by members of the Barbizon school, including Corot, Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet, present romantic visions of life away from urban cares.

Two of three works by the quintessential impressionist, Claude Monet, demonstrate the movement's defining characteristics: brushstrokes of different bright colors placed side by side, to be blended not by the artist but by the viewer's eye into a shimmering landscape reflecting a moment in time. Both works are scenes along the Thames, reminiscent of Houses of Parliament at St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts. All three works have holding power, though the St. Petersburg museum's work, perhaps because of its distinctive subject matter, has more flair.

Impressionist compositions had a fuzzy formlessness that soon metamorphosed into post-impressionism, expressed by Paul Cezanne, often considered the father of modern art, as well as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat. Mont Sainte-Victoire in the south of France was a subject of intrigue for Cezanne, who painted it many times, meeting the challenge of shapes in the foreground (in this case, the vertical wall of a quarry) while keeping the hulking mountain magnificent yet within his control.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, oil on canvas, from the Walters Art Gallery

From Cezanne came two giants of early 20th-century art: Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Picasso carried Cezanne's formalism into cubism, focusing on the many ways in which reality could be portrayed. Matisse carried the simplified concept of design into works of bold, spirited color.

These works suggest an easy path for modern art which, of course, it was not. The show also contains many other discoveries that contributed to the mainstream, or departed from it. Antoine-Louis Barye is represented by a rare painting, though the classicist is better known for sculpture such as the bronze castings of War and Peace at the Museum of Fine Arts. Also on view are works by Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The triumph of French painting is the triumph of modernism. No longer do the strictures of the academy apply, as modern art has redefined itself repeatedly.

The show, organized by the husband-wife team of Sona K. Johnston and William R. Johnston, curators of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, respectively, is a rare chance for comparable works from the collections to appear side by side. The Norton is the third of the show's five venues. From the Norton it moves to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Art review: "The Triumph of French Painting: Masterpieces from Ingres to Matisse," Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, through March 11. Works from Baltimore Museum of Art and Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. Audio guides available. Admission by advance ticketing for specific times; http://www.norton.org; (561) 832-5196.

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