Academic Overreaching At The Met

...Indeed, I suspect that the most hardened professionals may occasionally lose their bearings in the catalogue's turmoil of resuscitated names-as the show's annotators do...

...But the impact of the abridgement is difficult to determine, even with the help of the fully illustrated catalogue covering everything that appeared in Paris...

...Actually, as has been widely reported, the show is some 25 per cent smaller than it was when it started out last fall at the Petit Palais...

...short biographies of the artists...

...Delacroix is represented by some of his best known pieces, such as Liberty Leading the People, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, and Christ in the Garden of Olives, and in this context his vigor seems almost proletarian...

...An immense amount of detail has been unearthed about the beginning of Modernism and, by tracking down a remarkable number of obscure painters and examining their backgrounds, the contributors have done much to clear the air about one of the more arrogant Modernist delusions: Salon painting is no longer seen as the stuffy straightman to the real thing...

...The accompanying catalogue, for example, is a paperback tome a full one-and-three-quarter inches thick weighing more than four pounds...

...With major shows, two versions of an announcement are common where one would do...

...Essentially, the crisis confronting us concerns the overflow of words, neither an entirely new nor an unexamined emergency...

...It is an occupational eccentricity to derive as much pleasure from the supporting players as from the stars...

...Yet it is one thing to have seen endless reproductions of Thetis kneeling beside a Jupiter twice her size, reaching up to chuck him under the bearded chin, and quite another to contemplate these figures in all their bizarre unreality...

...some of them mailed, inexplicably, in quarto-sized manila envelopes...

...I had looked forward greatly to the show, expecting to find those lesser jewels frequently uncovered in collections of this type...

...But its regulation is more urgent than ever before if Tom Wolfe is not to be totally vindicated...

...As was true of The Impressionist Epoch show last winter, the present offering calls for more than a single visit...

...and a bibliography...

...Unfortunately, from the beginning of this display it is clear that no one has been found to challenge the supremacy of the established heroes...

...For those unable or unwilling to pay the $14.95 cover price, there is an attractive, newspaper-like brochure that pots the facts well enough and is free besides...

...Certainly no one ever deified an employer more effectively than he did Napoleon, all decked out in his Imperial costume...

...Lahille-Guiard, Vigee-Lebrun's great rival in portraiture, wears for her self-portrait...

...While the author of The Painted Word has been roundly dismissed for not knowing much about art, he can sure spot its trends: He ends his satire by foreseeing exhibitions of words illustrated with pictures reduced to the size of postage stamps...

...discussions of each painting...

...Yet if the styles themselves weren't born of politics, it appears that much of their subject matter was: The exhibition is a fascinating reflection of France's gyrations-all in the space of about 60 years- from Monarchism through Republicanism and Imperialism and back to Monarchism...

...On Art ACADEMIC OVERREACHING AT THE MET BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Continuing its relatively new policy of presenting massive didactic exhibitions, the Metropolitan Museum is currently host (through September 17) to French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution-produced jointly with the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts and the Louvre, and consisting of 147 paintings by 92 artists...

...The painting proves only how far the artist advanced in the three years separating it from the small Riderless Horse Race, with its lovely light flickering over the horse's flanks...

...In its place we are given the postulate that both movements were seeded simultaneously and earlier in the century by Enlightenment philosophy, also a cause of both the French and American Revolutions...

...essays by Frederick Cummings, Antoine Schnapper and Robert Rosenblum...

...I was particularly struck by the wall label to David's Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces...

...Many of them are fairly mesmerizing for their sheer, glossy competence...

...If that is so, then maybe we should rethink some of those goals...

...David's enormous equestrian portrait of Count Potocki (1780) lacks the panache and the skill of Van Dyck, whose work it resembles...

...Came the Bourbon restoration and Ingres was equal to selling its image too...

...And even they do not always look so good...

...The sharpest lesson to be learned from this artist, who despite his tendency toward weird anatomical distortions was a major inspiration to an impressive number of the greats that came after him, is that he was a most astute operator...

...A product of intense scholarship that keeps insisting it has but touched on the fringe of its subject, the volume features mainly black-and-white illustrations...

...I don't mean to denigrate the catalogue's intent...

...Dominating the exhibition are canvases by those formerly dismissed as academics-Gros, Guerin, Delaroche, Girodet and Prud'hon, to name a few...

...At one time, though, the ratio of explication to pictures an audience could comfortably accommodate was balanced by the conflicting needs of specialist and layman, with the latter too often being granted excessive leverage...

...I still retain a doubtless overheated memory of a Wildenstein show about the preliminary tremors of Impressionism, as manifested by lesser artists like Monticelli...

...The claim that lack of funds necessitated the cutback has been skeptically received in informed circles, the Met's spending habits being what they are...

...For all its supposed implications of national disillusionment with a failed Napoleon, the last is a clumsy effort that the artist himself wasn't pleased with...

...My own impression is that what we have here is general mediocrity shot through with a kind of craziness...

...It reflects, in addition, the fact that I found the pictures less interesting than the inferences to be drawn from them, and not for want of enthusiasm...

...By featuring artists great and mediocre, however, this melange of historical, mythical, religious, pastoral, and genre works- several of them colossal-ultimately turns what was formerly a neatly-organized period into chaos...

...A lovely work, it shows the heightened and clearing sense of color that was emerging at the time of his death...

...Seldom does one come across a stretch of painting as lively as the blue satin dress Mme...

...But the overabundance of data, important and trivial, leaves the reader paralyzed with confusion and unable to bring to the pictures the fresh eye they so urgently require...

...There is no telling what the researchers themselves think of the canvases they have gathered, so immersed are they in meaning and provenance...

...In any case, since the object of the event seems to be the kind of radical theoretical surgery that will affect the art market as well as rock the art history departments of the Western world, the economy may after all be a false one...

...Neoclassicism or Romanticism-at this distance the stylistic difference hardly matters, since both look to have been nostalgic gropings...

...Apart from the physical impossibility of supporting oneself on so sharply slanted a sword, the three parallels formed by the weapon, the soldier's leg and that of the horse are, compositionally speaking, terrible...

...This cautions us against seeing the pink and blue, late, awful canvas as evidence of the master's decline, on the grounds that it and related works "prefigured some of the goals" of abstraction...

...Having been under the impression that the artist, who died at the age of 31, did little of consequence after The Raft, I was surprised by his rendition of the head and shoulders of a kleptomaniac, one of a series of pathological portraits...

...Gericault's crowning opus, The Raft of the Medusa (1819), is not included here, but we are treated to what for me at least was the unexpected...

...That half of this review is devoted to the writing around the canvases is an ironic demonstration of the contagiousness of the phenomenon...

...Naturally, it is impossible to attempt a full survey of the miscellany at the Met-as interesting for its deficiencies as for its intermittent assets...

...Gericault is poorly represented by the equally huge Wounded Cuirassier of 1814...

...Bracing and "romantic' as that may be, it has the effect of leveling everyone except its promoters to the same disconcerting state of ignorance...

...Now, the specialists are being favored out of all proportion...

...Briefly, the old theory being dismantled at the Met holds that Neoclassicism was prompted by the French Revolution and was followed in orderly sequence by its antithesis, Romanticism...

...Apart from its vast purchasing splurges, I'd hate to think what the museum shells out just to keep the press up-to-date...

...And Ingres, of course, continues to be his familiar monstrous, magnificent self with his genius for texture, be it doughy flesh or diaphanous voile...

...There are one or two canvases of a homosexual flavor and several worthy of the mid-Victorian era, but not enough to pull in the "camp" crowd...

...I also feel that the show's producers hope the audience will, somehow, adjust its lenses and start accepting everything academic as docilely as it has accepted everything Modernist...

...guidance is definitely vital here...

...This raises the question of whether the Met may not soon lose the wider public it is seeking by overloading its circuits...