Le singe est dans l’arbre. The state visit to France was cancelled in the wake of protests at the very idea – quelle horreur – that the French might have to work just a little bit longer to take advantage of some of the most generous pensions in the world. The King – who is still working at 74, and whose mother died in harness at 96 – went to Germany instead to see his cousins.
While town halls burned, the National Gallery opened its latest Francophile offering: After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. It celebrates Paris as the international centre of the artistic movement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but also takes in the influence its artists exercised over their European contemporaries – and its later development into Cubism and Abstraction.
Cézanne, Picasso, Van Gogh are all here, and so is Gauguin – how the last has managed to avoid cancellation while the mob still bays for Jo Rowling remains a mystery. Works have returned to Europe from MOMA, Chicago and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT; others have come from Edinburgh, Paris and Barcelona. Private collectors have also opened up their personal treasuries.
The exhibition’s curators explain that “After Impressionism will explore two main themes in the development of the visual arts in Europe at this time: the break with conventional representation of the external world, and the forging of non-naturalist visual languages with an emphasis on the materiality of the art object expressed through line, colour, surface, texture and pattern.” Nope; me neither.
This is a massive show; does it appear ungrateful to say that it’s almost too large? The exhibits compete for attention in room after room, and it’s difficult to find an obvious narrative – but then perhaps that’s part of the point. It’s crowded, too. I much prefer reviewing shows with the punters in place, but on the day I went it was so busy that we could hardly move.
I know this makes me sound like a Philistine, and there really is some fascinating stuff here, even if it is a bit confusingly laid out. In one corner Lovis Corinth’s Rubensesque 1911 Nana: A Female Nude (she of the eponymous novel by Zola) jostles for attention with Cabbage Field (1915) by Edvard Munch. What was Munch thinking? To be fair, he was having a breakdown at the time.
Religion is pretty much absent, although there are exceptions. A dome or a spire in the background, as in Jan Toorop’s The Eve of the Strike (Dark Clouds), or the homely faith of so much of Europe at the time. Henry van der Velde’s pointillist Going to Church recreates a well-trodden scene: an old lady, seen from behind, shuffles her clog-shod way towards the just-discernible village Calvary.
Other scenes make a point of referring to religion while also rejecting it. Munch’s The Death Bed (1895) is notable for its absence of a priest; at a distance a painting that might reasonably have been called “Young John the Baptist with the Christ Child” is in fact Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Seated Girl with a White Shirt and Standing Nude Girl (1906). The latter’s face suggests the wind has changed.
Ugliness has a tendency to break out disconcertingly. Picasso’s Nude Combing Her Hair has obvious overtones of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but not enough to make up for the jolt it provides. Meanwhile, Cezanne’s Madame Cezanne in a Red Dress is homely (for which read plain), with just a trace of rosacea in her cheeks. Who can blame her? If I’d been married to Cezanne I’d have drunk too.
Ironically, the most captivating religious rendition in the whole thing is Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel). They do battle in front of an audience of Breton women in traditional costume, heads bowed in prayer. Elsewhere the curators deal sensibly with Gauguin’s problematic – for want of a better word – private life alongside his art. It is a naughty and fallen world.
Speaking of the Fall, Suzanne Valadon’s Adam & Eve (1909) gaze out from the coffee-table catalogue. Away from household names, an excellent chapter called “Women Artists of the Avant-garde, 1900-14” introduces female painters who held their own in a male-dominated world. Modersohn-Becker and Valadon, but also Emilie Charmy, Gabriele Münter, María Blanchard and Natalia Goncharova.
Now that would be a fascinating exhibition, and I hope that we may see it soon enough. As it is, the one in hand is like a five-course meal in which all the dishes are hot, with cheese, pudding, and savoury. There is just too much to be able to process it with the attention that each item deserves, although the National Gallery must surely be congratulated for so spectacularly bringing them all together.
And so Impressionism is not really for me; but of course it will be just the ticket for myriad others, not least the hordes who continue to descend on Trafalgar Square – and who am I to judge? I think the point of departure, if I’m honest, is the portraits. One alone speaks with natural humanity, as if it were a photograph: Santiago Rusiñol’s Modesto Sánchez Ortiz (1897). The rest are all a bit, well, odd.
That’s what so disconcerting – to see the human form so disjointed and discoloured and distorted. Weirdly, the Cubist portraits with which the show end seem to have more human qualities than those that precede them. But so much deliberate disfiguration of the summit of creation in which we see reflected the face of God seems – at least to me – to fly in the face of what art is for, and where it is from.
At its end the exhibition disgorges visitors into Room 9: El Greco, da Vinci, Bronzino, Michelangelo, Tintoretto and the rest. It’s a jarring contrast and a stark reminder of what all those Impressionists knew, understood, and yet consciously rejected – leaving a world of order and beauty for one of chaos and confusion. The French, as ever, have a lot to answer for. Où est la plume de ma tante?
Serenhedd James is Deputy Editor of the Catholic Herald. Photo: National Gallery, London.
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