The “Judgment of Paris” is a lively account of the French art scene in the decade leading up to the birth of Impressionism. Author Ross King tells the stories of proud and enterprising artists, while colourfully explaining some major European political dramas that exploded in the late nineteenth century and had reverberations in the world of French art. This is a broad sweep of history poured into one book, but it is a racy read that will pull you in.
Any avid art lover would do well to know the story of the birth of Impressionism and this book is a fine resource for those unfamiliar with the saga. This history exposes the vanities, flair and impetuousness of various artistic personalities from the nineteenth century. The astute reader may find amusement drawing some parallels between these distant melodramas and some behaviour among today’s art elites and the creative fringes.
The setting for this story is Paris at the time of the Second Empire of Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte III. This is a city of indulgences, known for its mammoth art exhibitions, society balls, absinthe addicts, cafes and rampant prostitution. Napoleon III was a benign autocrat, who knew little of art but who cannily sponsored entertainment in many forms to distract and titillate the Parisian population.
The storyline of this book revolves around the annual Salon exhibitions organised under the aegis of the French government. The Salon was an annual extravaganza held in a cavernous exhibition hall, drawing huge crowds of visitors. Artists craved acceptance into the Salon, because the inundation of press reports on the event could help ring overnight fame. Ross King describes the early careers of a number of artists who went on to become founders of Impressionism. But this book principally focuses on the career fortunes of two artists – one a celebrated and successful conservative, one an unconventional agitator. Both had surnames beginning with the letter “M”, so they were exhibited in the same room at the Salon. At different times they would take turns at providing the drawcard art in room “M”.
Edouard Manet was an ambitious but unsuccessful artist with obvious technical shortcomings, who spent most of his career seeking recognition from, but being rebuffed by, the French art establishment. For decades Manet’s loose style of painting was derided, as was his provocative choice of subject matter (such as a prostitute in a bordello, or a nude in a public park).
Lacking in technical polish, Manet lacked nothing in persistence and self belief. Excoriating reviews by art critics helped him achieve fame that came without the benefit of commercial success. Many of his works were made legendary by the ridicule heaped upon them and they drew crowds for all the wrong reasons. But in his last few years, as Impressionism gained a foothold among collectors, his sales appeal came good. As the collectors turned, so many critics too came to acknowledge his merits.
The book also traces the career of Ernest Meissonier, a neo-classical perfectionist who became renowned across the world for nostalgic paintings of French cavalrymen, swordsmen and statesmen. His greatest achievements were panoramic battlefield scenes that paid homage to the exploits of Napoleon Bonaparte. From early in his career Meissonier commanded lucrative prices, eventually drawing the wealthiest of collectors, ranging from American industrial magnates to British Royalty.
King recounts how Meissonier and Manet both started as outsiders in the eyes of the French art elites. An earlier generation of artists had dominated the successive selection panels of the Salon and official bias was towards heroic paintings of Greek mythology and Christian parables. Favouritism fell upon artists who had won previous recognition in other official art competitions, or who had secured commissions to paint murals for great public buildings. Manet and Meissonier join forces at the start of this story in petitioning for a more liberal regime for choosing exhibitors at the annual Paris Salon, so that fresh styles and genres could enjoy exposure. Their remonstrance was snubbed by the bureaucrats, until Emperor Napoleon III stepped in and declared he would order two simultaneous exhibitions, one of accepted art alongside one of rejected art. The “Salon des Refuses” added to the carnival vibe of the Salon season, and ironically, far from helping unfashionable artists, it exposed them to more punishment from the witty, hurtful barbs of art critics in the popular press.
After initially working in common cause, the two main characters in this book drift into opposing camps. Meissonier becomes the new figurehead for the triumphant school of conservatives who idealised nature and glorified the past. Manet found himself allied to younger realists who favoured rustic and contemporary scenes. This was a pre-Impressionist battleline in French art tastes. Despite all the schisms within the Parisian art scene, this was an undoubted heyday in the history of French art. The splendid artworks at the Paris Salon exhibition attracted visitors from around the world and helped secure French cultural prestige and dominance in the esteem of top art collectors.
The story takes a disconcerted twist when the French enthusiastically rush into a war with Prussia. The war of 1870 brought about a quick plunge into calamity as French illusions of greatness were shattered by the efficient Prussian military machine.
I think that the nub of this epic tale is that the excitements and vanities of the French art world were shaken pathetically into perspective by the turn of political events. One moment conceited Parisian artists engaged excitedly in conflicts of ego and taste, gaining media notoriety for their audacity or brilliance. In a matter of weeks their city is besieged, starved, bombarded and then occupied. National self-confidence quickly gave way to recrimination and civil war between communards and monarchists, ending with mass exodus of civilians, arson attacks on great buildings by the communards and summary executions of radicals by government firing squads. King describes the adventures and misfortune of artists who enlisted in uniform and those who colluded in a short-lived revolutionary municipal government. Petty differences between artists in a time of peace look feeble, measured against some of the searing animosities that arose after the debacles of 1870 to 1871.
It is easy for art history students to ignore the political backdrop to the emergence of new art movements. The shift from reverence of grand historic subject matter towards preference for plain domestic themes owes something to French misfortune and embarrassment of the battlefield. The emergence of the Impressionists also owes something to the small “p” politics of dissenters like Manet who had battled censorship, refused to conform to the stylistic conventions of the day and pressed for more inclusive and democratic forms of juried exhibitions. Ross King reminds us that Impressionists brought about their success by creating a fraternity of artists who shared ideas on technique and took succour from each other to defy prevailing fads and disregard the smears of the critics.
The writing is mostly dispassionate, balanced and engaging. King has done a deal of research, working with a range of art historians and getting some translations of source material from original French. The one let down of the book is the pitiful number of illustrations, comprising some token colour plates in the middle (away from the relevant text) and small black and whites spotted thinly among the chapters. The art addict feels teased to read descriptions in this book of hundred of artworks, while only a fraction of them are reproduced. This is an enjoyable text looking for a good publisher. Ross King gives us the tale of those who braved the impassioned judgment of Parisian public opinion and opened an imaginative and beautiful new chapter in art history.
Book specs:
Hardcover 448 pages, 9.5 x 6.5 inches (16 colour, 45 b&w illustrations)
Other books on Impressionism and French Art:
Showing posts with label neoclassical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neoclassical. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Theodore Chasseriau: The Unknown Romantic
Yale University Press’s monograph on artist Theodore Chasseriau is a tribute to one of the great French Romantic painters who has had little recognition in the chronicles of art history. The book is aptly titled “The Unknown Romantic”. I’ve chosen to highlight this book to fellow art lovers because it is packed richly with seductive works by an imaginative artist and because, after its initial release, the price of this book has come down to real bargain territory – an unfortunate sign that the publishers may not have completely succeeded in their objective of making this “unknown” better renowned.
As a boy prodigy of 11 years old Theodore Chasseriau was admitted as an apprentice to the studio of Jean Ingres, a giant of nineteenth century French painting. As a young man he enjoyed early successes and went on to a meteoric art career, before an early death at age 37. Chasseriau had artworks selected for the great French Salon exhibitions, he sojourned through Italy to study renaissance art and most importantly he travelled to Algiers, triggering a rich output of Orientalist works.
Chasseriau has been scornfully dismissed by French art critics as a precocious Creole (his grandmother was West Indian), while his style has been belittled for drifting between mimicry of his master Ingres (a photo realist of his day), towards resemblance to the art of Eugene Delacroix (a Romantic with a loose and fluid style). His hybrid style has made him a bit of a curious footnote in art history. After Chasseriau’s death, his output was widely scattered and in 1871 his most famous public commission was badly damaged by fires lit by members of the Paris Commune. One of his cousins was instrumental in collecting his works posthumously and donating them to the Louvre, an effort that made possible subsequent revival of interest in this artist. This volume helps rehabilitate Chasseriau’s name based on a complete picture of his output. The book helps reveal an artist with a strong theatrical imagination and a unique style that prefigured the sensual and dreamlike paintings of the Symbolist school which emerged a couple of decades after his passing.
Young Theodore’s penchant for drawing Oriental and Indian figures began at an early age, thanks to stories from a mostly absent father who engaged in all manner of adventures abroad (military, diplomatic, trading, spying and possibly embezzlement in between). And his move into an uncertain artist’s career was supported by his eldest brother who was left as head of the family. Recognising the boy’s talent, Ingres reputedly nicknamed him the “Napoleon of painting”. He drilled the lad in oil technique and fostered his knowledge of the progress of art: from Antiquity, to the Renaissance, to the Neo Classical movement. But a breach opened between the two after Ingres abandoned his pupil to live in Italy and as the boy began to socialise after hours with members of the Romantic school.
Chasseriau’s greatest success came in his mid 20s with a commission to paint 270 square metres of murals for the grand staircase leading to the Court of Audit in the Palais d’Orsay (later burnt down, and today reincarnated as art museum The Musee d’Orsay). Surviving and rehabilitated fragments of this monumental work are reproduced in this book, but I do not think these remnants are the real centrepiece of Chasseriau’s legacy. A more significant marker in his career was his stay in Algiers which unleashed experimentation with paintings of Eastern themes including Arabic battle scenes, Moorish dancers, Jewish families and fleshy harem beauties. These lively paintings are the real drawcard in this book.
Chasseriau’s exotic females were distinct: sensual, elongated and confident. One biographer wrote boldly that he “had the privilege of endowing the world of art with a female type whose physique and physiognomy had not existed before him.” His shimmering colours and stylised realism all attest to an artist that sought to put emotion into his work. In his words he strived to put “poetry in reality.”
The guts of this book is the catalogue of 256 paintings and sketches assembled for an exhibition at three venues, including in France and in New York. Each image is reproduced in colour and a small number are also supported by close-ups. Each artwork enjoys a short description, including interesting stories about some commissions, quotes from contemporary critics and background on the aristocratic sitters in the formal society portraits (a staple of the artist’s income in his early years). A strength of this book is its display of numerous compositional sketches, tonal drawings and colour roughs that were used to plan subsequent canvases. These help to show the artist’s working methods and are very attractive artworks in their own right. My one quibble is that some of the fine pencil sketches are printed too small to adequately bring up the detail.
Written and researched by a cavalcade of historians from art museums, this book sometimes lumbers under the weight of meandering history about the art circles and movements of the era. This is the heavy style of publisher Yale University Press, the pre-eminent organ of art history writing in the English speaking world. Fortunately in this book, the text does not cramp out the abundance of dazzling art. The book is also slightly larger than the regular Yale publication, a mark of quality that may have something to do with co-production with major French art institutions and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The biographical chapters on Chasseriau are very readable, more so than the thematic essays that are inexplicitly jammed up front ahead of the visual and biographical survey.
This book does vindicate Chasseriau as an author of some stunning artworks. But it is also true that he shows the heavy imprint of influence by other masters (as argued by his critics). His portraits are alike Ingres’s portraits, including the preparatory pencil works. His later paintings do have the broad brushwork style of the melodramatic painter Delacroix and the comedic artist Daumier. But Chasseriau’s work is far less dark than either of these latter contemporaries. His uplifting compositions seek to find and extol the beauty in this world and in my view that is his unique contribution which marks his place in art history.
His murals for the Palais d’Orsay are said to have influenced the more famous muralist Puvis de Chavannes and, through him, he had an influence on the Symbolist movement. Chasseriau died of sickness and exhaustion from commissions to decorate two churches with murals. Had Chasseriau lived longer I believe he could have been to French art, what the prolific artist Tiepolo was to Italian mural art. I certainly see some stylistic similarities to Tiepolo which may hint at his true source of inspiration, perhaps a legacy of his travels in Italy?
It is hard for an artist to enter the pantheon of famous artists, without having good retrospective art books to their name, that bring their imagery together into one collection. This book does just that for Chasseriau, helping students of art history appreciate his achievements and what was distinctive in his art. But it will take wider and continuing recognition, for Chasseriau’s contribution to be better known. Disregarding the historical purpose of this book, it is also a great collectible for any admirer of Orientalist, Romantic or Symbolist art. This is artwork which commends itself to you on the strength of its beauty, not on a basis of a famous name.
Book specs:
Cloth bound hardcover, 432 pages, 12.3 x 9.5 inches, 326 illustrations (267 colour)
Recent books on some of Chasseriau's contemporaries:
As a boy prodigy of 11 years old Theodore Chasseriau was admitted as an apprentice to the studio of Jean Ingres, a giant of nineteenth century French painting. As a young man he enjoyed early successes and went on to a meteoric art career, before an early death at age 37. Chasseriau had artworks selected for the great French Salon exhibitions, he sojourned through Italy to study renaissance art and most importantly he travelled to Algiers, triggering a rich output of Orientalist works.
Chasseriau has been scornfully dismissed by French art critics as a precocious Creole (his grandmother was West Indian), while his style has been belittled for drifting between mimicry of his master Ingres (a photo realist of his day), towards resemblance to the art of Eugene Delacroix (a Romantic with a loose and fluid style). His hybrid style has made him a bit of a curious footnote in art history. After Chasseriau’s death, his output was widely scattered and in 1871 his most famous public commission was badly damaged by fires lit by members of the Paris Commune. One of his cousins was instrumental in collecting his works posthumously and donating them to the Louvre, an effort that made possible subsequent revival of interest in this artist. This volume helps rehabilitate Chasseriau’s name based on a complete picture of his output. The book helps reveal an artist with a strong theatrical imagination and a unique style that prefigured the sensual and dreamlike paintings of the Symbolist school which emerged a couple of decades after his passing.
Young Theodore’s penchant for drawing Oriental and Indian figures began at an early age, thanks to stories from a mostly absent father who engaged in all manner of adventures abroad (military, diplomatic, trading, spying and possibly embezzlement in between). And his move into an uncertain artist’s career was supported by his eldest brother who was left as head of the family. Recognising the boy’s talent, Ingres reputedly nicknamed him the “Napoleon of painting”. He drilled the lad in oil technique and fostered his knowledge of the progress of art: from Antiquity, to the Renaissance, to the Neo Classical movement. But a breach opened between the two after Ingres abandoned his pupil to live in Italy and as the boy began to socialise after hours with members of the Romantic school.
Chasseriau’s greatest success came in his mid 20s with a commission to paint 270 square metres of murals for the grand staircase leading to the Court of Audit in the Palais d’Orsay (later burnt down, and today reincarnated as art museum The Musee d’Orsay). Surviving and rehabilitated fragments of this monumental work are reproduced in this book, but I do not think these remnants are the real centrepiece of Chasseriau’s legacy. A more significant marker in his career was his stay in Algiers which unleashed experimentation with paintings of Eastern themes including Arabic battle scenes, Moorish dancers, Jewish families and fleshy harem beauties. These lively paintings are the real drawcard in this book.
Chasseriau’s exotic females were distinct: sensual, elongated and confident. One biographer wrote boldly that he “had the privilege of endowing the world of art with a female type whose physique and physiognomy had not existed before him.” His shimmering colours and stylised realism all attest to an artist that sought to put emotion into his work. In his words he strived to put “poetry in reality.”
The guts of this book is the catalogue of 256 paintings and sketches assembled for an exhibition at three venues, including in France and in New York. Each image is reproduced in colour and a small number are also supported by close-ups. Each artwork enjoys a short description, including interesting stories about some commissions, quotes from contemporary critics and background on the aristocratic sitters in the formal society portraits (a staple of the artist’s income in his early years). A strength of this book is its display of numerous compositional sketches, tonal drawings and colour roughs that were used to plan subsequent canvases. These help to show the artist’s working methods and are very attractive artworks in their own right. My one quibble is that some of the fine pencil sketches are printed too small to adequately bring up the detail.
Written and researched by a cavalcade of historians from art museums, this book sometimes lumbers under the weight of meandering history about the art circles and movements of the era. This is the heavy style of publisher Yale University Press, the pre-eminent organ of art history writing in the English speaking world. Fortunately in this book, the text does not cramp out the abundance of dazzling art. The book is also slightly larger than the regular Yale publication, a mark of quality that may have something to do with co-production with major French art institutions and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The biographical chapters on Chasseriau are very readable, more so than the thematic essays that are inexplicitly jammed up front ahead of the visual and biographical survey.
This book does vindicate Chasseriau as an author of some stunning artworks. But it is also true that he shows the heavy imprint of influence by other masters (as argued by his critics). His portraits are alike Ingres’s portraits, including the preparatory pencil works. His later paintings do have the broad brushwork style of the melodramatic painter Delacroix and the comedic artist Daumier. But Chasseriau’s work is far less dark than either of these latter contemporaries. His uplifting compositions seek to find and extol the beauty in this world and in my view that is his unique contribution which marks his place in art history.
His murals for the Palais d’Orsay are said to have influenced the more famous muralist Puvis de Chavannes and, through him, he had an influence on the Symbolist movement. Chasseriau died of sickness and exhaustion from commissions to decorate two churches with murals. Had Chasseriau lived longer I believe he could have been to French art, what the prolific artist Tiepolo was to Italian mural art. I certainly see some stylistic similarities to Tiepolo which may hint at his true source of inspiration, perhaps a legacy of his travels in Italy?
It is hard for an artist to enter the pantheon of famous artists, without having good retrospective art books to their name, that bring their imagery together into one collection. This book does just that for Chasseriau, helping students of art history appreciate his achievements and what was distinctive in his art. But it will take wider and continuing recognition, for Chasseriau’s contribution to be better known. Disregarding the historical purpose of this book, it is also a great collectible for any admirer of Orientalist, Romantic or Symbolist art. This is artwork which commends itself to you on the strength of its beauty, not on a basis of a famous name.
Book specs:
Cloth bound hardcover, 432 pages, 12.3 x 9.5 inches, 326 illustrations (267 colour)
Recent books on some of Chasseriau's contemporaries:
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