On Art

...Marty conceived the idea of issuing a series of albums on a subscription basis, each to contain 10 prints by notable artists of the day...

...At that time, the academic artists they had replaced were being classed as hopelessly old-fashioned...

...The haphazard way they were chosen makes L'Estampe Originate a slice of the art-life of the period...

...Perhaps the following anecdote, said to date from the period in history when modern artists had at last begun to win public acceptance, will illustrate my point...

...The younger Pissarro, who was then living in England, called attention to the handful of minor English artists that were also selected...

...Others thought a charming domestic scene would do the same: Besnard, Vignon, Luce...

...What is surprising, I think, is the level of competence displayed in the works of several little-known or unknown artists...

...History, fortunately, remains more open-ended, various, complicated and mysterious than historians and journalists, constrained by their need for conciseness and dramatic effect, ordinarily can allow...

...On Art PORTRAIT OF A PERIOD BY JAMES R. MELLOW L'Estampe Originate is the title of a remarkable publishing venture undertaken in the early 1890s by Andre Marty, the director of a French art journal...

...In the '90s, as now, fine-art prints were enjoying great popularity...

...The names that have assumed importance for us, such as the Nabi painters Bonnard and Vuillard, appear to have been solicited only indirectly, although Marty made the final selections...

...There was a good deal of experimentation in the field: Color lithography, for example, a relatively new technique developed for commercial use, had begun to attract more adventurous young artists like Lautrec and Bonnard...

...Which, of course, they are...

...At this level, the show is a roll call of clever ideas, easy pieties, cheap sentiments, the stylishly morbid, the fashionably perverse...

...Camille Martin's five-color lithograph for the cover of the fifth album--a printing press and an aggressively creeping vine placed in surrealistic juxtaposition --is a striking and effective piece of decoration...

...The Nabi painters K.X...

...Some of the artists hoped that a pretty face or a bit of nudity would make a pretty work of art: Gandara, Feure, Somm, Boutet...

...The studies of attractive women by Helleu and by Goeneutte are interesting for their sheer technical facility and superb draftmanship...

...Similarly, Toulouse-Lautrec suggested Pissarro who, in turn, suggested his son Lucien...

...After these exemplary models come the ranks of the inferior...

...In fact, it is partly because of many second- and third-rate artists that the show is as instructive as it is...

...All this--the expense of talent, energy and ambition, the conglomeration of good and bad, the reminder of wasted hopes left bleaching on the shores of art--makes the artists of Marty's L'Estampe Originate seem our semblables, our freres, our contemporaries...

...Marty apparently regarded the project as only a short-term enterprise, for the quarterly issues came to an end with a final album de cloture in 1895...

...The beautiful, smoky-gray view of the Thames by Joseph Pennell, who was Whistler's friend and Henry James' illustrator, alerts one to the quality that is often consigned to oblivion when minor artists are relegated to the footnotes...

...One print, a painfully stiff portrait of the decadent writer J. K. Huysmans, with a cat and a votive altar to the Virgin Mary occupying the background, probably succeeds more for literary reasons than artistic ones...

...the latter by a spooky glimpse of an androgynous couple in tender embrace...

...Yet some of the most interesting examples are not by famous names...

...Willette was also among those who counted upon timely political references, now meaningless or uninteresting, to give their work significance, as in his "Revenge," an easy thrust against German nationalism, or Bracquemonde's sturdy French rooster crowing "Vive le Tsar...

...Roussel and Maurice Denis, names one encounters in any history of the period, are well represented...

...As Miss Stein notes, "The contributors were intricately interrelated through ties of friendship, family, or aesthetic...

...There were those who nurtured a taste for the exotic or the morbid, as seen in Prouve's "Opium," a pallid nude stretched out amid limp poppies, and his theatrically ominous "Birds of Prey...

...L'Estampe Originale, however, is a valuable and instructive presentation--one of several now on view at the Cultural Center--and it is well worth seeing...

...As a publisher, Marty was not intentionally an impresario of the new and the radical...

...With some justice, he was protesting against the way the true picture of a period becomes distorted when the success of an artistic movement eclipses its contemporaries who were also part of the historical scene...

...He seems to have begun by selecting well-known and reputable figures like Rodin, commercially successful artists like the poster designers Cheret and Grasset, and the now virtual unknowns like Jean-Francois Raffaelli (represented by a very decent self-portrait), a prestigious artist who commanded equally prestigious prices in his day...

...The range of techniques and styles in Marty's albums is representative--etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, woodcuts, and even some embossing...

...They are, in a sense, too good--almost chilling in their perfectionism...

...This may seem an odd reason for recommending an exhibition, but it has a point...

...According to Donna M. Stein, who provided an informative text for the catalogue, Marty's project has received little critical attention...

...Although recognized as an innovation in print-making, standard references usually give it only a line or two...

...Considering that Lautrec, Whistler, Bonnard, Vuillard, Redon, Renoir, Pissarro and Gauguin were among the 74 artists represented, L'Estampe Originate was indeed a bargain...

...Do what you will about it," he said, "we are still contemporaries...

...the former by a vivid little scene of two women training a puppy...

...It depicted dancer Jane Avril examining a print hot off the presses at the Ancourt printing plant, an establishment Lautrec and many other Parisian artists favored...

...A few relied upon some exacerbated religious feeling to confer a blessing on their efforts, like Schwabe, with his spiky, gothic "Annunciation" and Bernard (who almost makes the grade) with his heavy "Crucifixion," patently borrowed from artists of the Middle Ages...

...What makes L'Estampe Originale intriguing--both the original publishing venture and the present exhibition—is that the "contemporaries" are all present and accounted for...

...It has also produced a handsome catalogue raisonee of the series, featuring Lautrec's original color lithograph for the first album on its own cover...

...The craze for Art Nouveau and Japanese prints is amply evident, as is the influence of more settled modes like Impressionism...

...The prints by the artists already mentioned would be worth the trip alone, even though the two Renoirs (sketches of his son and a pair of young bathers) strike me as offhand exercises...

...They gave the increasingly art-minded middle and upper-middle-classes an opportunity to buy original works of art at modest prices...

...The subscription price was 150 francs a year, or roughly $30...

...A conservative painter, angered by the publicity the new art was receiving, confronted one of the radical artists in a gallery...

...The first of his large-sized albums appeared in March 1893, with a splendid cover lithograph by the young Toulouse-Lautrec...

...Eugene Carrere's two lithographs, moody studies of women's heads rendered with a distinct psychological forcefulness, are more ingratiating...

...Some minor artists tried to disguise a little pornography as moral fable, for example, Willette's "Fortune," a nice bit of nonsense about a lucky encounter between a voluptuous nude and a strapping, bare-chested working man...

...Equally effective are Guilloux' "The Deluge" and Rachou's "Decorative Panel," minor works by minor artists, certainly, but executed with a panache that makes them still creditable...

...There are, nevertheless, two starkly dramatic Redons, three Lautrecs (a clever lithograph of a theater scene with the curtain being rung down was done for the cover of the final volume), a charming but atypical Pissarro bathing scene, and equally significant prints by Vuillard, Bonnard, and Whistler...

...The critic Roger Marx, who was commissioned to write a preface for the albums, seems to have been responsible for recommending most of the Nabis...

...The New York Cultural Center, at Columbus Circle, is now showing (through February 14) a rare complete set of the nine albums, 95 prints in all...