An offer they couldn't refuse:

...With the sea...

...Yet the fact reand Peter thought at last they could do something reliable...

...The new installation, century...

...When his brother Jean-Paul could be neoclassical...

...The fishertobacco has always made hard labor a bit more doable, and men Apostles had surely seen other fishermen drown, or hauled so I feel confident that at least one or two of the Apostles would up their bodies, and so when Peter falters while walking on have used tobacco had they been able to...

...We know there were exceptions, though, express himself simply and fluidly...

...I might say Peter, because he was a worrier to swim, and firsthand he had seen men killed by the sea...

...Today's fishermen not course of my stay, I talked with the men, with Achille, Lucien, only have boats with massive engines but radar, sonar, and shortSerge, Jean-Paul, Jeannot, and Angelo about almost every sub- wave radio...

...And they could have sailed for a landmark that was the best at it, and everyone said so...

...Many fishermen throughout the at the time, at least some of them would have smoked it...

...They would have almost naked in hot weather-Angelo...

...fishermen had done for thousands of years and were still doing If there was a kind of natural stimulant at the time, at least all over the world, was to feel close to the eternal...

...There was no jealousy would have seemed a mere wisp, a cloud, but that would have there, because quite a few of the fishermen didn't know how, been home...

...In Sanary, Angelo were also probably more or less permanently tinted, at least the told me that when he was a boy, every day after school he had palms, because the nets they let out and hauled in would have to go out with his father to lay down their nets...

...In that time, I went out with the fisher- better...

...than fish...

...It's funny to won- water, perhaps we can sympathize...

...The probMarket...

...These four men would have known how to sew been quite astonishing, especially out on the water...

...Not world even today do not know how to swim...

...So when Christ and o'clock in the morning and continuing relentlessly through- his disciples are caught in a storm-Jesus having fallen asleep, out the day and often just until bedtime, eighteen hours later...

...Competing rituals of style, each one rooted constructed with a classical serenity in mind: visitors walk through in a different sacramental-like aesthetic doctrine, flourished arches, past Ionic columns and cornices, and under ovolo mold- with sectarian ardor...

...0 In the old Andre Meyer Galleries, the painting collection was hung in a vast rectangular space on walls and obliquely placed ART movable screens...

...moved with tremendous sureness and concision, all their years of hard-fought knowledge in their hands and eyes and steadican tell you that the four Apostles' eyes would have ness of frame...

...He nearly invisible, clinging to a nail or embedded in the hair of quit school when he was fourteen...

...And we remember best the poetry of Jesus' words, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men...

...He may not have been able der which one...

...of the Roman Empire yet...

...AN OFFER THEY RICHARD GOODMAN COULDN'T REFUSE THE APOSTLES BECOME FISHERS OF MEN n November 1991, I went to Sanary-sur-Mer, a small Apostles when you are with fishermen, because anyone who town on the Mediterranean coast of France a few miles has a personal interest in Christianity-whether it be emotional west of Toulon to write a book about fishermen...

...Wait, I think lem with the new galleries, though, lies not only in their selfI have the number right here...

...It might be possible for the right architectural ender about Jesus' words, "Follow me, and I will make you fish- vironment to capture the spirit of an age in which the paintings ers of men" and how suddenly and unreservedly the four men and sculptures were made (never mind that this exhibition covleft their nets and joined him...

...in the dead of night or just before dawn to catch the fish at The fishermen were not religious, at least not formally or their feeding times...

...As far as finally burned itself out, and they have seized the opportunithe French government is concerned, the fishermen in the Var ty to build a revised interpretation of nineteenth-century art...

...I can tell you these men authority and would have cheated Caesar out of his rendering 20: 22 October 1993 Commonweal if they could have...

...None of them ever went to church...

...Perhaps it is sim- no direct experience with the possible consequences...

...The effect was disconcertingly satisfying, random beauty springing up out of apparently ordinary chaos...

...Hulme's description of romanticism of Art has spent $12.4 million on the renovation of a as spilled religion can be applied to most of the art movements wing to house its renowned collection of nineteenth- that turbulently succeeded each other throughout the nineteenth century paintings and sculptures...

...I want ly a nineteenth-century ambiance is...

...But certain things endure...

...Their hands would have been flaked with scales, fore school he had to go out again to haul up the nets...

...After having lived and worked with French two hours off the coast in thirty-foot, diesel-powered boats...

...whatever feeling about God they might have...

...And they followed, as we all know, at once...

...To see it myself until much later, after we decreased the distance by him there, his arm raising and lowering as he sewed away as half...

...It was house seem like reproductions straining to live up to their origin Jesus' time, too...

...Some of the fish the Apostles caught had little schooling and probably did not know how to read in the Sea of Galilee are similar to fish men catch off the coast and write, because they would have joined their fathers on their of Sanary today...

...But to have seen Peter and because the Bible says at one point that Peter was stripped for Andrew in their own element, on a fishing boat, was to have work...

...Anything but this...

...Then I came to embedded in a thumb or sensitive finger tip for months and realize that these men had come upon too many instances where months...

...It is a good thing to watch a man sew his nets...

...Romanticism, realism, impressionism, ings with egg-and-dart patterns...

...He and the other fishermen in Sanary felt they The conviction that inspired these new galleries was that, received nothing in return for their tax money except restric- again in the words of the Times art critic, "nineteenth-century tions and more restrictions...

...I stayed or intellectual or both-seeks to be able to see these twelve men eight months...

...And every morning becorrosive effect...

...The problem is also in defining what exactto do something else, and others were always plotting...

...The father of modem realism, Courbet refused Commonweal 22 October 1993: 21...

...But it could just as well be neogothic, had a son, the new father vowed the boy would never even or a Beaux Arts eclecticism that includes Renaissance and barstep foot on a boat...

...The French government doesn't give a damn postmodern eighties, the Great Modernist Conflagration has about us...

...They sails and mend nets...

...During the The work has changed, of course...

...Hearing that marvelous promise, wouldn't you at least consider leaving all else behind and-following...

...Most likely you could have seen the glistening of an God had not helped them and that, in fact, nothing was clear- irregular scar down the side of a finger from the teeth of a deser to them than the simple idea that they were alone...

...Matthiessen's men lead much more perilous bowl-shaped, and that they had been ripped by fish quills and lives than my men in France, so I was surprised by this...

...The and a doubter, and those kinds of burdens can often be as- Sea of Galilee is like the Mediterranean in that storms arise suaged with a little help from some nicotine...

...It is still a raw and dangerous job, but more imporhad their icons tacked on the cabin walls of the boats-Saint tant, even with the technology, it is still unreliable...

...They still leave surprising that religion was one of these subjects...

...In Peter Matthies- What I can tell you about these Apostles, one of whom would sen's moving book, Men's Lives, which is about fishing and go on to be the first pope and, after his death, possess the keys fishermen on the south fork of Long Island, religion is hardly to the gates of heaven: I can tell you their hands were large and mentioned at all...

...So that makes me won- structures...

...blood pulsing through it...

...But not always their bod- Peter in this light...

...But in a boat on the sea even if you do know how to swim...

...Maybe John, James, Andrew, ers an epoch with countless contrary spirits...

...If you pressed them about their beliefs, the men today-as Peter, Andrew, James, and John did-cast their first thing many of them would say was that they did not like nets into the sea and pull them up, not knowing whether there priests and felt no need to step inside any church to validate will be fish, or not...

...I was spines...

...Most memorably, if one of these four men took fishermen in Sanary do not know how to read or write and have your hand in his, you would have felt the strength of stone with difficulty signing their own names...

...If we are more or less resigned to a prettified, Italianate men on their boats in all weather, in the fall, winter, idea of Jesus, we can still hold out hope for a more direct, human, spring, and early summer...

...The fisher- claimed that the galleries made "great paintings seem minor," men in Sanary were less than forthright with the French gov- as the senior critic for the New York Times recently put it...

...the latter they would have done with a large, would have been able to recognize other boats, and so flat needle, rapidly, those battered fingers moving and darting their owners, when they were still smudges on the hori- expertly...

...Yet whenever you think of fishermen, it's hard not to eventually summon up the Apostles...

...Commonweal 22 October 1993: 19 perate fish they had netted...

...Had the Arabs introduced coffee to this part They could have worked side by side...

...When I was in Sanary, one of the men quit inals' reputations...

...What mystery and allure in those ten words...

...conscious grandeur that often makes the marvelous works they Fishing is unreliable, discouraging, and dangerous...

...feet...

...The ernment about how many fish they caught and how much they Metropolitan curators seem to feel that with the close of the sold them for...

...It's not out on waters that are volatile and featureless...

...These sumptuous works little to help the viewer appreciate Daumier's The Laundress, will be on display six months of every year, from July to or Millet's peasants, or anything by Courbet, whom French poDecember, until Annenberg's death, when the museum will per- lice chased around Paris during the 1848 revolution after havmanently take over the collection...

...I'd come on board to talk with needle out there in that infinity and have not been able to spot him but mainly just to watch his hands deftly working...

...They work hard, as fishermen always have...

...Fisherman would have to wait fif- I can tell you that Peter, Andrew, James, and John probably teen-hundred years for tobacco, but if it had been available did not know how to swim...

...Detractors an income they most likely would never obtain...

...Modernity broke up the vision of infinity that earlier a suite of twenty-one galleries called the Nineteenth- had been held together by sacrament and ritual into the fragCentury European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, has been ments of "isms...

...mains that many nineteenth-century artists worked in opposition Maybe, they might have thought, it was easier to catch men to whatever they perceived the spirit of their age to be...

...Though the spontaneity could seem willed, the display was the TOO HIGH THE CORNICES museum equivalent of Chekhov's celebrated imperative for writTHE MET'S NEW GALLERIES ers to evoke "moonlight on a broken bottle," only here it was the viewers who turned corners and met the epiphanic shards of what was once the big picture...

...They still use nets, though the fabric is openly religious...

...Achille said on more than one occasion...

...After 2,000 Joseph or Saint Peter or, in Achille's case, the patron saint of years, it is still a job with absolutely no security...

...to be a bodyguard," Serge told me, "for some big shot in Toulon Architecturally, the representative nineteenth-century style or Marseille...

...This essay has been excerpted from his next book, also to be published by Algonquin...

...quickly and with violence, often trapping fishermen out in the In Acts, it is said of Peter and John that "they were unedu- open in small boats...

...ply because that was the way it was for most ordinary people Finally, they would have had little or no regard for Roman at the time, but I have another reason...

...That perhaps one or two of those pulsing devils remained until I spent more time with French fishermen...

...Swimming is a all the fishermen in Sanary were smokers, but Lucien, Angelo, recreation, and someone must teach you how, and fishermen and Jeannot were and they smoked heavily, starting at three seldom have time for that, even as boys...

...So, how many fish did we catch last year...

...In fact, two or three of the their fingers...

...Isn't it easier to have faith when you have cated, common men," and I can tell you why...

...Achille did one of them would have used it-whether it was coffee or what Peter had done, and he didn't do it that much differently...

...Achille zon...

...which he seemed to do in moments of stress-and they are Watching them light up in the predawn blackness and take in afraid, remember this: It is scary enough sometimes to be out a lungful of smoke made my own lungs feel constricted...

...Their profession, as it always had been, was teenth-century collection, the Andre Meyer Galleries, was that a chancy one, so why should the government receive taxes from they had displaced older art into a modernist setting...

...Simply put, lobster fishermen...

...It's hard not to think of the RICHARD GOODMAN is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France (Algonquin/HarperCollins...

...They probably would have remained clothed, even in hot mality of thoughts dictated and the priggishness of a man sudweather, to protect themselves from the immense reflective denly elevated to a position of great moral weight unable to strength of the sun...

...The centerpiece incidence that, as art in the nineteenth century progresses, the of the new exhibition is Walter Annenberg's gift of fifty-three source of light in paintings becomes more and more obscure...

...They fishermen for eight months, I can tell you certain things about cast their mile- to two-mile-long nets to depths of up to 600 four of these Apostles because they were fishermen...

...By twelve or thirteen, they would teeth of so-called "everyday" fish...

...This style of presentation had much to recommend it...

...And now they even received or- art looks best in nineteenth-century rooms...

...Being uneducated does not make you less honorable, but it And their faces...

...I have been with Achille or Lucien out on the water or had given it up, and so didn't care...

...Perhaps it is no coweightless elegance of their particular details...

...Even in Sanary, there was one fisherman who worked seen competence and grace and knowledge...

...Most of the men fish waters about vision of the Apostles...

...He usually rebeen heavily dyed a dark crimson to protect them from the water's turned by seven, just in time to eat...

...do not exist...

...With their gleaming parquet postimpressionism, symbolism are the colors that stain the floors, daunting wall space, and ageless motifs, the galleries windows of nineteenth-century modernity, every movement have an imposing, almost regal atmosphere to them, for all the projecting its own version of visual truth...

...And these rooms ders from countries other than France through the Common are indeed calm, spacious, and pleasing to the eye...

...Yet, they different...

...They seem to me to have the awkward fories...

...ing got wind of the artist's plans to blow up the column in the The critical consensus on the previous home of the nine- Place Vendome...

...But I used to wander at dawn when the gray of the water melted into the gray of the down to the quay on bad weather days and find Achille on his so-called day, and have seen them pick out their buoy, a tiny tethered boat mending his nets...

...We remember that four of themPeter, Andrew, James, and John-were fishermen...

...impressionist and postimpressionist gems, including some The neoclassical grandiosity of the new galleries does very miraculous paintings by Cezanne...

...Fishermen still venture ject imaginable-many far outside the realm of fishing...

...Let no one underestimate the efficacy of the boats at a very early age...

...something else...

...I think a lot of the men would have done oque elements, or English Regency, which could mimic Islamic something else, had they been able to...

...The fishermen Apostles' hands have been doing the work of grown men...

...The n a lavish feat of nostalgia, the Metropolitan Museum British philosopher T.E...

...Their faces would have had a burned look is interesting to look at the two letters in the Bible attributed to from time spent on the open water...

...You and even hours later, at home, they would still find one or two, can see I didn't have much time for homework," he said...