On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art FROM RUSSIA WITH SPLENDOR BY BRADLEY W. BLOCH Leningrad's Hermitage Museum is one of the world's great art treasuries. Until recently those unable to make the trip to the Soviet...
...This established her as amajor figure in the art world—and gave her plenty of pictures to hang on the walls of the Hermitage, originally built as a refuge for her affair with a military officer named Grigori Orlov...
...Through energetic, farsighted purchases, they each gathered an astonishing cache of Cézannes, Picassos and Gauguins...
...Along with his upright recorder, the wandering musician in the picture carries a furry rodent called a marmot, a play on la marmotte, slang at the time for the female genitals...
...The first part of the exhibition is a virtual catalogue of the leading French salon painters: Ingres and Greuze, David and Boucher...
...I think it would be going too farto suggest that From Poussin to Matisse is an outright apologia for the aggressive art collector...
...1763), a family gathers around a dying patriarch...
...But I was thrown for a loop by computer reproductions of a number of works in the show that carried price tags of up to $2,000...
...Then, as today, buying art at auction was a competitive sport, and Catherine went at it with the determination of a Japanese industrialist, purchasing several important collections in their entirety...
...When the institution was closed in 1948, a victim of official hostility toward modernist "decadence," its holdings were divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin...
...In the middle stands the man's son-in-law, patiently feeding him soup...
...By the beginning of the 20th century, it revived, though, and the acquisition of French art resumed at a pace rivaling that seen during the reign of Catherine the Great...
...began the Museum of Modern Art in New York—to form the State Museum of Modern Western Art...
...Boilly has filled the canvas with 36 people and four dogs, split the crowd into groups of twos and threes and used various other compositional devices to keep the viewer from being overwhelmed...
...In his hands the still life, often a mere virtuoso piece, is transformed into a jousting match between subjects and backdrop...
...The arabesque-patterned table covering expands to fill almost the entire canvas, drowning the bowl of fruit, vase and chocolate pot that are the nominal subjects...
...The exhibit does not really end with the paintings: From the room of Matisses one is unavoidably led into the From Poussin to Matisse gift shop...
...A recent scholarly suggestion that the painting has its source in an ancient bas-relief comes as no surprise...
...Indeed, its real theme is the glance and the touch...
...The Russian admiration for things French ended abruptly when Napoleon crossed the Neman River and marched his wayto Moscow...
...Its main figure is a young woman lining up her shot, but much more is going on...
...As Diderot noted at the time, by making the son-in-law rather than one of the blood relatives the central caregiver, Greuze affirmed the importance of the family bond...
...Sevilte Still Life II (c.1910) depicts a pot of geraniums, some pitchers and fruit...
...Hasn't the brush been consecrated to debauchery and vice long enough...
...After centuries of secondary status, the tablecloth finally had its revenge...
...Perhaps one of the offending pictures he had in mind was Jean Antoine Watteau's slyly erotic The Savoyard (c.1716...
...Shchukin developed an early strong liking for Matisse, and the last room of the exhibit is devoted to 10 works by the artist that show him at his impish best...
...It is easy to imagine why the Russians liked the canvas, mirroring as it does the intricacies of the contemporary court...
...A child reaches for his mother's face, a woman holds onto the shoulder of a friend as she shoots a look across the room, and a bon vivant, turning on his charm, lays a mercurial hand on one lady while being watched by another...
...This time the impetus came not from the aristocracy but the rising merchant class...
...in fact it makes the point that a good painting is a good painting, regardless of the owner's ulterior motives for acquiring it...
...Elizabeth grew up a Francophile, and her father, Peter the Great, had hopes of marrying her to the French King Louis XV...
...The Metropolitan show is actually as much about collecting as it is about art...
...Petersburg, she was not Russia's most formidable art collector...
...Flowers thus compete with floral patterns...
...the subjects are too rigid to evoke much response from the viewer...
...Jean Baptiste Greuze is represented by two scenes from family life, and despite their theatricality they are as complex as Boilly's...
...It is a moral painting," he wrote in approval...
...Until recently those unable to make the trip to the Soviet Union to visit it have had to content themselves with occasional glimpses of its holdings afforded by loans to special exhibits, like last winter's Picasso and Braque show at the Museum of Modern Art...
...Without those qualities, one is likely to end up with either the illusory (overpriced knockoffs) or the transitory (art of the moment...
...Especially prominent were two textile entrepreneurs, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov...
...Matisse undoubtedly intended this to be a scene of intimate emotion, but it falls flat...
...The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is presenting From Poussin to Matisse: The Russian Taste for French Painting, which brings together 51 canvases from the Hermitage and also from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow...
...Selling catalogues is fine, of course, and I can overlook the Matisse-inspired scarves...
...There is a pervasive tension in Boilly's painting between how people are posed and where their eyes are directed...
...Although Elizabeth promoted Parisian culture in St...
...That distinction would belong to Catherine the Great, who ruled from 1762 to 1796...
...In one of them, entitled The Paralytic (c...
...Yet acquiring such items has little to do with art-collecting—which, in addition to money, requires a discriminating eye and an abundance of patience...
...The painting depicts an enigmatic confrontation between a man and a woman— actually Matisse and his wife...
...Even more extreme is Still Life with a Blue Tablecloth of 1909...
...To a great extent the cultural phenomenon, mediated by political alliances and court intrigues, had its genesis in the 1741-62 reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna...
...Although the palette and shallow perspective are typical of the artist, the mood is unusually somber...
...Their collections, nationalized after the October Revolution, were combined in 1923— six years before the Alfred Barr Jr...
...Diderot's commentary on The Paralytic demonstrates, too, that in cultural controversy there is nothing new under the sun...
...Now, however, amore substantial sampling of the Hermitage's wares is on display in the West...
...Each piece is accompanied by an account of how it came into Russian hands —information of particular interest these days, when the activities of artmarketeers hold much fascination for the public...
...I've always found museum gift shops as revealing about contemporary culture as they are annoying, and this one is no exception on either count...
...Here, for instance, we see lovers sneaking into an empty room forakiss, or, inaborrowing from Virgil, chasing each other across the countryside...
...It is expensive enough to be taken seriously by the connoisseur manqué, and it carries the imprimatur of one of the world's great museums...
...This stupendous show, on display at the Metropolitan until July 29, travels next to the Art Institute of Chicago...
...With them, by contrast, the results can be magnificent, as From Poussin to Marisse illustrates...
...Among the other efforts by Matisse— an engaging portrait of his wife, a group of children playing a game of bowls, and so on—one painting sticks out like an off-key chord...
...their expressions, ranging from hopeto curiosity to fear, are a compendium of responses to death...
...He focuses attention on the woman taking her turn, for example, by echoing her arched back with a line formed by two dogs and an onlooking couple...
...The table on which they sit and the sofa behind it are draped with colorful Spanish shawls the artist collected in his travels...
...Fancying herself an intellectual, Catherine carried on a lively correspondence with Voltaire and with Diderot, who served as one of her chief art advisers...
...One of the most intriguing items in this section is Louis Boilly's The Billiard Party (1807), depicting a Parisian billiardhall of thetime...
...In 1912, Shchukin bought Matisse's monumental Conversation (1909) and hung it in a place of honor on his dining-room wall...
...The French demurred, not wanting to offend a nervous England, but they made up for it later by supporting her seizure of the throne from the infant Ivan VI...
...These pricey reproductions form an ironic coda to a show that is, in a sense, atributetoart-collecting.A$2,000poster is calculated to appeal to the visitor who wants a riskless way to be part of the art-buying boom of the past decade...
...The private sphere was a common source of themes in French painting of the period as well...
...As any reader of Tolstoy or Turgenev knows, the esthetic appetites of the Russian aristocracy were much influenced by the French...
Vol. 73 • July 1990 • No. 9
